Disability Related Employment Discrimination At Record Levels
A spike in disability related job bias claims led to an all time high in the number of federal job discrimination charges filed last year.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, handled 25,165 claims of workplace discrimination based on disability in fiscal year 2010, up 17 percent from 21,451 the previous year. Those claims were among nearly 100,000 the EEOC received last year for job bias, marking the largest number of charges handled in a single year by the federal agency.
http://eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/1-11-11.cfm
Employment – Labor Department Report Shows Employment Rate for People with Disabilities Falls to 21%
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has released disability employment statistics for December showing that the percentage of people with disabilities in the labor force was 21.0. By comparison, the percentage of persons with no disability in the labor force was 69.6. The unemployment rate for those with disabilities was 14.3 percent, compared with 8.9 percent for persons with no disability, not seasonally adjusted. The apparent discrepancy between the 21 percent employment rate and 14.3 percent unemployment has to do with how unemployment is defined. Not being in the labor force is not the same thing as being “unemployed”. People are classified as unemployed if they had no employment during the reference week; they were available for work at that time; and they made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t06.htm
Planet of the Blind 
American Foundation for the Blind has a good explanation of employment statistics, updated in October of last year, in relation to people with vision impairment at:
http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=15&SubTopicID=177
The BLS doesn’t publish disability-specific data, but it is available by special request, which is what AFB has done. Although AFB details reasons that the data could be unreliable, for people with vision impairment, all employment indicators for this population showed some improvement from December 2009 to September 2010. For example, the employment-to-population ratio for adults from ages 16 through 64 rose from 32.0% to 37.7%. It will be interesting to check the December 2011 stats when they become available on AFB’s website. Regardless, the employment gap between people with and without disabilites remains large; efforts must continue to improve these numbers.
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Sometimes I wonder if the increase in statistics like this could be due to an increase in the number of people who are aware of their rights, and therefore likely to make a complaint to the EEOC. (Probably not, but it makes me feel less saddened by the stats!)
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