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BILL KIERNAN
KIERNAN: Well hi. I’m Bill Kiernan and I’m the Director of the Institute for Community
Inclusion which is the University Center for Excellence and Disabilities located at UMASS
Boston and also at Children’s Hospital in Boston. And over the last many years I’ve
been involved with a lot of uh efforts around expanding employment opportunities for people
with disabilities. What’s been interesting to me is a number of factors that are changing
and uh it… it may seem odd at this point to be talking about getting people with disabilities
into employment when we have an unemployment rate that looks at eight and nine percent
in many states. Um and it isn’t odd. It’s really important to think a little bit more
broadly about employment over the longer haul and looking at our general workforce.
Let me just first comment on the unemployment rate since that’s the figure that everybody
sort of looks at. And an unemployment rate is really a pretty useless number. It doesn’t
tell you much about anything because there’s a lot of people who aren’t necessarily working
in jobs who get discouraged and they leave jobs and they’re not counted in that number.
So basically you got a number that doesn’t tell us much. There’s a much better number
that I think we ought to look at and that’s the number of what we call workforce participation
rates or labor force participation rates and that’s generally the number of persons who
in the population are engaged in work. So if we had a hundred people sitting out in
the audience there we would ask how many people are working and they would raise their hand
the number would probably about 72 out of a hundred.
RUCKER: Mmhm.
KIERNAN: So that means that 28 people aren’t working. They’re doing something else and
the something else might be they’re in school although people would argue that’s work.
They might be at home raising children which we would… nobody would argue that’s work.
They would all agree it’s total work. Or they may just have hit the lottery or they
may have retired and they’re doing some fun things that they don’t consider work.
That are really meaningful to them or meaningful to others. So we’ve got a population of
people who are really engaged in doing some things differently. Not everybody works. So
the labor force participation rate is a much better measure. It tells us how many
people are engaged in work. If we were to look at the employment of people
with disabilities and we look at the data and we’ve collected data for the last 20
years on that, the data are really pretty grim. And in fact in the last eight years
they haven’t advanced at all. We haven’t seen any changes in the labor force participation
rates. And what we really see for persons with significant disabilities, however you
define it, and it can be defined a myriad of ways but for significant disabilities it’s
really the labor force participation rate is anywhere between 12 and 18%. So let’s
translate… let’s make it simple and say it’s 20%. That means that one out of every
five persons with disabilities are working.
Now why is that a big issue? It’s a big issue because the major challenge for people
with disabilities is poverty and isolation. And poverty is one of those things that we
look at people with disabilities and almost 40% are persons with intellectual disabilities
live in households that are poor. They’re at the poverty level. How do you get out of
poverty? Earnings, money, you work. And so that’s one of the important pieces about
employment is that it gives you some economic resources so that you can go and buy things.
You don’t have to be poor. But the second thing which is really important about the
workplace is that’s where most of us now and for the last two decades have made our
social networks. We make our friends out of the workplace. If you’re never there you
really limit the opportunity to make friends and friendships. And so those are the two
factors that I think are really important for persons with disabilities. One is it’s
a gateway out of poverty and two it’s a gateway into inclusion and membership.
So now that we’ve established the idea that employment is an okay thing to do um the question
becomes so what are we going to do about it and how are we going to change that number
from 20% or 15% or 14% or whatever it is and it varies by different groups of people. How
do we get it up to and what should we get it to? And if you really believe that people
with disabilities ought to have the same opportunities that everybody else does then why don’t
we just take that labor force participation number and use that? So it’s… it’s a
little bit like a GPS. Many of us have GPSs and we, the most essential element of a GPS
is you got to be able to punch in a destination. You got to have a place to go and if you don’t
have a place to go it doesn’t work for you. So let’s take our… our place to go in
employment of people with disabilities if we could agree it’s important and it’s
a gateway out of poverty and it’s a gateway to friendships in part. Not the only way but
certainly a big one. That we take the labor force participation rate of 72.9%, because
we think that people with disabilities ought to have the same opportunities that that’s
the outcome. That’s what we really want to look at. So now our target goal is that.
And so the question is how do we get to that target goal when we got on our so called unemployment
rate of eight percent? Two things – one is that that unemployment rate’s going to
change because the demographics in the U.S… the older worker makes up a disproportionate
size of the workforce and they’re going to step out and they’re going to retire.
And two things happen. One is it’s going to put a demand on services because they’re
going to purchase services. And then the second one, which is equally interesting, is that
the older worker who stays in the job over a longer period of time acquires things called
health conditions who if we put them in age 30 we’d call them disabilities. You know
I didn’t always wear glasses. And as my kids would always say I remembered better
than I do now which is probably not true but anyway that sort of stuff. And so I acquire
some limitations that… that in my workplace I make accommodations for. And those accommodations
aren’t terribly different than the accommodations you make for persons with disabilities who
maybe don’t see so well, don’t hear so well or have some memory issues like me.
And so when you talk about it the fix is relatively straight forward and it fits the entire workforce.
So as you sell their concept to industry, industry begins to see that in fact accommodating
people with disabilities is good also for accommodating an older workforce that they
desperately want to keep in some instances, not in all, but in some instances. And so
you can see that the plan and the schedule is really set for a change in the… in the
labor rate and the workforce participation rate for persons with disabilities. As our
workforce ages, as employment opportunities become more rampant because the workforce
shrinks and the chance for us to better understand universal application of accommodations in
the workplace for the… the workers of the future, which are the older workers, workers
with disabilities and the recently arriving immigrant workforce. So that’s my take on
employment for the future.
RUCKER: Thank you very much. 2