Meera Jagannathan writes about workplace inclusion at Moneyish:
“It’s important to remember that people with disabilities are not a homogenous community,” said Sheehy, who experienced a spinal-cord injury more than two decades ago and uses a wheelchair. In addition to spanning every race, nationality and ethnicity, she said, people with disabilities may have blindness or be hard of hearing; have chronic conditions like lupus or multiple sclerosis; have intellectual disabilities or autism spectrum disorder; or have psychiatric disabilities like depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder. (Consider that many disabilities are invisible to observers.)
...Earlier this month, Paige Smith reported at BNA:
Employees with disabilities “often get stuck in the assistant trap,” said Rebecca Cokley, the director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress and a little person. So provide pipelines for them to move up the corporate ladder: “As you start to see employees with disabilities move up the ladder in a corporate setting or even in a nonprofit setting, you start to see the culture shift around what it means to be a person with a disability,” she said.
Federal contractors now have an incentive to make disability inclusion a workplace priority: two years of freedom from audits by the Labor Department’s enforcement agency.
The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs on Oct. 5 proposed an award to recognize federal contractors who facilitate opportunities for individuals with disabilities.
The agency’s regulations establish a 7 percent goal to “recruit, hire, promote, and retain” individuals with disabilities, under Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act.
...
Award or not, most contractors won’t be scrambling to apply, Ogletree Deakins attorney T. Scott Kelly told Bloomberg Law.
Many contractors are too busy “trying to grapple with all of the other regulatory requirements OFCCP has out there,” Kelly said.
