Foreword
Roads More Easily Traveled

I’M MORE CONVINCED THAN EVER there are basic misunderstandings on the part of both employers and job seekers with disabilities about what each other needs. These misunderstandings are holding back progress in dramatically improving the employment rate of individuals of working age with disabilities.

Why are there gaps in understanding between job seekers with disabilities and potential employers? Many of us may have simply taken roads more easily traveled than those we often bypass because we believe they’re perhaps more dangerous. Yet, those bypasses, we sometimes forget, can be more rewarding.

Here are some concrete examples.

As cited later in this book, more than four of ten respondents to the first-ever national study of self-employed people with disabilities said they chose the entrepreneurial route because they “needed to create their own job.” A similar number also said they had chosen self-employment with its flexible hours and working conditions “to accommodate a disability.”

These are just two findings from a study conducted by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research’s Research & Training Center on Rural Rehabilitation Services, connected with the University of Montana–affiliated Rural Institute on Disabilities.

“Research has shown that there are nearly as many people with disabilities who own their own business as who work for federal, state, and local governments combined,” says Rural Institute research director Tom Seekins. “When you consider the extraordinary difficulty that people with disabilities have had finding employment, starting one’s own business makes good sense.”

I’ve recently heard that same logic about the 180,000 or so veterans who have come home from Iraq and Afghanistan with disabilities since 2003. Government and private support people are encouraging these vets to start their own businesses instead of jumping into the job market, because it simply may be easier.

It’s true that these vets have probably acquired many valuable skills that may be immediately transferable to establishing small businesses. But many individuals with disabilities (with and without military service) lack the work experience either in a job or as a volunteer necessary to establish a small business. They may lack the track record people often need to establish access to capital and/or credit, and they may also lack a customer base. They must have credible offerings of goods and/or services and, it is hoped, a ready source of potential clients. Even for people without disabilities, that often takes years of working on the job for someone else. And what seems like an easier road ends in disappointment—in phantom businesses, which keep them busy but don’t produce an adequate income.

Instead of working themselves up from entry-level jobs (where they can refine their basic skills) to positions of greater and greater responsibility (where they can show their savvy) and then using their contacts and track records to gain a clientele as small business owners, they have short-circuited their careers.

That shoe also fits on the other foot. In my view, employers also must be on guard against hiding behind phantom reasons why they don’t hire more people with disabilities.

The U.S. Census Bureau says that 73 percent of the top industries (Fortune 5,000 companies) across the country are hiring people with disabilities.

Yet, the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey says that in 2006 the employment rate for people with disabilities was 37.7 percent, compared to an employment rate of 79.7 percent for people without disabilities, a difference of 42 percentage points.

Why?

According to the National Council on Disability’s “Achieving Independence: The Challenge of the 21st Century,” the most commonly cited reason for not hiring people with disabilities is a “lack of qualified applicants.” That’s closely tied to another reason we commonly hear: “the inability to locate or find qualified job applicants with disabilities.”

“Lack of qualification” can include a deficiency in education, experience, “hard” skill, “soft” skill, or a specific attribute. Or, for unenlightened employers, it can signal they haven’t found good sources of qualified workers with disabilities … just yet.

From my perspective as the executive director of the U.S. Business Leadership Network, an organization comprising more than 60 affiliates and 5,000 employers interested in advancing disability employment, disability marketing, and doing business with disability-owned enterprises, employers are simply seeking talent—genuine, bottom-line-driving talent that everyone might well possess, including workers with disabilities.

These employers are more than ready to accommodate workers with disabilities just like they accommodate all their workers (such as working parents whose children become sick during work hours, or workers who seek better task lighting, lumbar-supported desk chairs, or flexible working hours to address their religious beliefs).

President Obama’s Deputy Secretary for the U.S. Department of Labor, Seth Harris, examined the accommodation issue in a research paper he wrote while a law professor at the New York Law School. In his paper, he maintains there is little truth to the overblown notion that the Americans with Disabilities Act’s (ADA’s) accommodation mandates “make workers with disabilities more expensive to employ than workers without disabilities and, therefore, less appealing to employers.”

In fact, ADA accommodations often benefit everyone in a workplace, according to earnworks.com (http://www.earnworks.com/BusinessCase/
innovation_level2.asp). For example, When A&F Wood, a small manufacturing company in Howell, Michigan, reorganized a workstation to accommodate an employee with a visual impairment, it discovered a more efficient layout for all employees to use. Similarly, Walgreens modified its distribution center’s supporting technology, making it easier for its employees with disabilities to use. What Walgreens soon discovered was that the changes simplified tasks for all employees, increasing productivity.

We need a constructive dialogue between job seekers with disabilities and employers. Both are, in some ways, taking the road most easily traveled. By doing so, we’re passing by each other—sometimes missing each other by miles.

This book is intended to assist all employers, enlightened or not, and all job seekers, qualified or not, to “look beyond the road most easily traveled,” and find one another.

Not connecting is a loss for us all.

John D. Kemp
Executive Director
U.S. Business Leadership Network