Kathleen Martinez, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) says government programs are helping people with disabilities get jobs.
This past Tuesday was the original deadline for public comment on the U.S. Department of Labor’s proposed new rule that would require businesses seeking federal contracts to be more active in recruiting and hiring people with disabilities. Instead, the department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) announced on Tuesday it has moved the deadline to Tuesday, February 21. According to the Human Resources – Business and Legal Resources website, which provides compliance news and tools for HR professionals, the 14-day extension was given in order to provide additional time for employers and the public to review the proposed rule.
As we noted back in December, the proposed rule is intended to add a level of accountability to the government’s existing policy for its contractors and subcontractors. The current language encourages organizations wishing to do business with the government to hire people with disabilities, while the new rule would require them to strive for the concrete goal of having these people comprise 7% of their workforce.
Enforcement of the new rule would rely heavily on government contractors increasing their efforts to collect data on the number of people with disabilities they interview for open positions as well as hire. Some business leaders have expressed concern about the costs incurred by this additional record-keeping. In the January 13 edition of “The Proactive Employer” podcast, Leigh Nason, a shareholder in Ogletree Deakins law firm and its chairperson for the Affirmative Action and OFCCP Compliance Group, said:
This part of the proposed rule has certainly raised contractors’ blood pressure… the challenge is to find any goal that is not only practical, based on employment location and the skill set needed, but is also attainable.
Meanwhile, Labor Department officials continue to reach out to organizations and make the case for including people with disabilities in the workforce. In a press release issued on Marketwire, the Kessler Foundation said Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Office of Disability Employment Policy Kathleen Martinez met with seven program directors about their approaches for expanding job opportunities for people with disabilities, while also sharing some of her department’s own success stories:
Martinez pointed to ODEP’s Add Us In initiative, which increases employment opportunities for job-seekers with disabilities in the small business market, especially those owned by minority groups. These businesses are creating jobs at a faster rate than the national average.
The rule proposal is one of two executive orders issued by President Obama during his first term intended to increase hiring of people with disabilities. In 2010, Obama called on the federal government to hire 100,000 people with disabilities over the next five years. The Office of Personnel Management has created a list of prequalified candidates to help attain this goal. In her article for Air Force website, Debbie Gildea talks to Sonia Ybanez of the Air Force Personnel Center, about how they are taking advantage of this list to accelerate recruitment efforts:
‘… [Q]ualified individuals with targeted disabilities can be hired non-competitively without recruitment, without posting and publicizing the position, without clearing the priority placement list and without going through the certificate process,’ Ybanez explained. ‘That saves a lot of process time.’
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Image by the U.S. Department of Labor, used under its Creative Commons license.