The Americans with Disabilities Act cleared the way for more people with disabilities to enter the workforce. But there are no national statistics on what they experience at work. Now a new survey of the obstacles they’ve overcome and the barriers they still face looks at attitudes employers hold, the accommodations they seek and — surprisingly — the government programs intended to help them that actually are a dis-incentive to their entering the workforce. The 2015 National Employment and Disability Survey‘s been released by the Kessler Foundation. Its President and Chief Executive Officer Rodger DeRose told NJTV News Anchor Mary Alice Williams that people with disabilities face challenges in the workplace.
“There are so many different types of myths that exist for people with disabilities in the workplace, that the largest issues that they face are typically lack of training and education to be relevant for the job that they’re going into,” said DeRose. “So that’s an important issue for them to overcome. Another issue is transportation issues for people with disabilities and a third and probably the most important that they face is attitudes, from people with disabilities — both from a supervisory point of view in terms of supervisors not thinking that they could do the job as well as coworkers thinking the same thing.”
The survey data is broken into the categories “faced” and “overcome”. DeRose said that facing an obstacle is going into a job — such as transportation, pay and attitudes — and overcoming them refers to how issues are addressed in the workplace or how the disabled individual moves to a new environment.
DeRose says the results of the survey will help frame how the Kessler Foundation spends money and invests funds. DeRose said that the organization is targeting major issues that people face.
“It will help us frame how we spend our money, how we invest our funds as an organization, as a grant maker, a funder of many of these types of programs so that we’re targeting the major issues that people face, number one,” DeRose said. “I think secondly, it may influence other grant makers that may not be funding disabilities right now but recognize that if they’re in the job poverty economic development area that with 20 percent of the American population having some form of a disability, that in recognizing that people with disabilities oftentimes live in poverty, that this may be an issue that they may want to fund as well.”
DeRose also said that he is hopeful that politicians will use the information gathered from the survey to address some public policy issues, including public benefits that are provided to people with disabilities.
The Kessler Foundation provides funding resources, according to DeRose.
“We fund other non-profits that have a skill set to help for-profit companies hire and find people with disabilities and then train their workforce in how to deal with people with disabilities in the workforce,” he said. “And the issue that we try to address is that we do not want to create sheltered workshops for people with disabilities, where it’s just people with disabilities. We want to have them working side by side with able bodied individuals for the same pay, being held accountable for the same metrics and then demonstrating that they can actually do the work.”