Senator urges agencies, Congress to hire more disabled employees
By Alyssa Rosenberg [email protected]
April 14, 2008
The federal government must hire more people with disabilities to
meet its obligation as a model employer, said Sen. Richard Durbin,
D-Ill., in a Monday lecture at New York Law School.
“We should show employers by example why it makes good sense to hire
and promote people with disabilities,” he told students and professors
during the fourth annual Tony Coelho Lecture in Disability Employment
Law and Policy in New York.
Durbin cited a January 2008 report from the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission on the federal employment of people with
disabilities. That report found that there were only 90 people with
targeted disabilities, which include blindness, deafness and mobility
loss, in senior pay grades in the federal government. Overall, EEOC
concluded, the federal government employs fewer people with
disabilities now than it has at any point during the last 20 years.
The Illinois Democrat also noted that Congress was equally far behind
in its efforts to hire people with disabilities.
“Congress, we should look at ourselves,” he said. “We honestly don’t
know how many people with disabilities work in Congress. In the
Senate, each office is its own little kingdom. There is no central
effort to engage more people with disabilities.”
Durbin has two disabled staffers in his office, and Coelho, who
authored the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act when he served in
the House, said Durbin has vowed to push his colleagues to commit to
adding 10 people with disabilities to their Senate staffs each year.
The
House already has a similar commitment in place.
Hiring more people with disabilities is important, Durbin said,
because it allows companies and the government to tap a largely
ignored talent pool of motivated, efficient workers at relatively low
cost.
Another recent study found that disabled workers consistently scored
as well or slightly better on performance reviews than their
able-bodied counterparts. They also took fewer scheduled and
unscheduled days of leave. The average cost of accommodating a
disabled worker was $313, and the most commonly requested
accommodation was a flexible schedule, according to the report,
prepared by DePaul University researchers, the Illinois Department of
Commerce and Economic Opportunity, and the Chicagoland Chamber of
Commerce.
“When millions of Americans with talents and skills our nation
desperately needs are shut out of the workforce, you don’t need a
Ph.D. in economics to tell that’s bad for the economy,” Durbin said.
The best way to improve the federal government’s hiring practices is
not through legislation, he said, but via a change in culture and
through presidential initiative, such as the one President Bill
Clinton announced in 2000 to hire an additional 100,000 federal
employees with disabilities.
Durbin acknowledged that it would take time for the federal
government to change attitudes about disabled employees, but said
outstanding examples already exist.
“Who would believe that a few months after being shot down and losing
her legs that could run for Congress and run the
?” Durbin asked. “Her husband
is deployed. She is living by herself as a double amputee. As she does
that, she dispels the myth that being a double amputee means that it’s
over.”
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