| To varying degrees, governments in the United States have embraced initiatives to enhance employment of individuals with disabilities. Yet, despite these efforts and despite affirmative action protections afforded to this population, people with disabilities remain unemployed at levels more than twice that of people without disabilities.
Decades of incremental employment policy reforms has produced a tangled web of programs supporting disabilities employment. Programs are fragmented, misaligned, uncoordinated and overlapping. Most importantly, they have categorically failed to produce a meaningful change in the employment of individuals with disabilities despite billions of dollars spent. Very few programs track job placement or job retention. Few have accountability measures and none are funded based on performance. Recommendations are made for governments to become model employers of individuals with disabilities. Public administrators should realign programs, foster more accepting organizational cultures, and adopt aggressive disabilities hiring practices as part of their long-term human resources planning efforts. . |
Updated 03/19/2014