Harkin: Americans with Disabilities Leaving Labor Force at Alarming Rate

[Omaha Steve]

http://call-center-performance.tmcnet.com/news/2011/04/13/5442227.htm



(Targeted News Service Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) WASHINGTON, April 12 -- Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, issued the following news release: This morning, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) gave the keynote address at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Corporate Disability Employment Summit. A longtime champion for people with disabilities, Harkin sponsored the Americans with Disabilities Act, and as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, he recently held a hearing to identify barriers to employment for people with intellectual disabilities and strategies that have successfully improved employment opportunities. Today, he sounded the alarm on a disturbing trend: more than two thirds of Americans with disabilities are without a job, and adults with disabilities are leaving the labor force during this recession at more than 10 times the rate of adults without disabilities. Harkin called on the CEOs and business owners in the audience to join him in his goal of increasing the number of disabled Americans in the workforce from 4.9 million today to 6 million in 2015.

"As we enter into the third decade of implementation of the ADA, my central priority is improving employment opportunities and outcomes for people with disabilities. The ADA and the special education laws have combined to produce the best-educated population of people with disabilities in U.S. history. And yet, while the majority of them would like to be working, the shocking fact is that more than two thirds of Americans with disabilities are without a job. In fact, now that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting regularly on the employment situation for people with disabilities, we have strong evidence that it has gotten disproportionately worse for workers with disabilities in the last two years. According to BLS data, between March of 2009 and March of this year, the size of the disability workforce shrunk by 395,000 workers to about 4.9 million workers," Harkin said in his remarks.

"When this drop is compared with broader labor force trends, you can see that more than one in three American adults who have left the labor force in the last two years have been people with disabilities. That means that, during this recession, adults with disabilities have been leaving the labor force at a rate more than 10 times the rate of adults without disabilities.

This disturbing trend line has not received much attention from policymakers or the public. We need to recognize that it has a huge budgetary and social cost. For example, it has been accompanied by increases in applications for Social Security Disability Insurance benefits, which have grown from an average of 200,000 new applications per month at the beginning of 2008 to an average of close to 250,000 per month by the end of 2010.


FULL story at link.

[happyslug]

1. Last Hired, First Fired

Sorry, but the Handicapped, like people on welfare, fall into that Category of people economists refer to as "Last Hired, First Fired". The "Last Hired, First Fired" are those people, that employers will not hired UNLESS no one else is available. Most people who are in the "Last Hired, First Fired" group have some sort of Disability (Many people on Welfare, other then families on Transitional Aid for Needy Families, TANF, are on welfare do to difficulties doing work related activities, showing up for work on time, following instructions, being on task, getting into arguments with co-workers etc). AS you can see, many people in the "Last Hired, First Fired" have mental problems that hinder them in the work force, and as such tend to be the "Last Hired, First Fired" for those reasons. The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) addressed this problem, but employers given a choice between such employees and "normal" employees will opt to keep the "Normal" employee every time. The reason is simple, employers see such "Normal"Employees as more profitable to retain then people who are in the "Last Hired, First Fired" group.

Notice, the above comment relates more to people with mental problems then physical problems.. Let remember that 60% of the people on Supplemental Security Income (SSI) are on SSI do to Mental disabilities, for the mental disabilities is what is preventing them from working NOT the physical disabilities. Most people with Physical disabilities have some work background, even before ADA, and this end up on Social Security (Or get Social Security based on their parent's Social Security for they have had the physical problem before they turned age 22). Thus the main effort to get the disabled employed has been as to mental disabilities and those are the most likely to be in the "Last Hired, First Fired" group.