Raising Expectations: A Commitment to Full Participation in the Twenty-First Century Workforce

Raising Expectations: A Commitment to Full Participation in the Twenty-First Century Workforce

Braille Monitor
November 2015

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Raising Expectations: A Commitment to Full Participation in the Twenty-First Century Workforce
by Christopher Lu
From the Editor: Christopher Lu serves as the deputy secretary for the United States Department of Labor. He appeared on the 2015 convention agenda on Friday morning immediately following a presentation by a newly graduated high school senior, Angel Ayala which appeared in the October 2015 issue. Secretary Lu obviously was moved by those remarks and President Riccobono’s pledge to Angel. Here is what the secretary said:
Thank you so much, Mark, for that kind introduction. Mark, I want to thank you and this wonderful organization for your seventy-five years of advocacy. I was moved by your words about your having Angel’s back, and let me say that we have the backs of everyone in this room, and we are proud of our partnership with the NFB.

In the 2014 State of the Union, President Obama said, “The best measure of opportunity is access to a good job.” The folks in this room know better than most people that people with disabilities want to work, can work, and deserve to work. They want the same things we all want: the feeling of pride and purpose that comes with waking up every morning, performing a job, earning a paycheck; the ability to make choices about the course of their lives, what they do, where they live; the ability to support families, raise children; the ability to enter the economic mainstream, and at bottom the ability to earn a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.

Now I use the word they, but it’s really we; it’s really us. People with disabilities are our friends, our colleagues, sisters and brothers. They are members of every part of our community, and, most importantly, they are young people like Angel: people that we work for every single day at the Department of Labor to ensure that they have a fair shot at opportunity in their future. So our goal in the Obama administration is really quite simple: we want to level the playing field and provide equal access to good, integrated, and competitive jobs for all people with disabilities. To do that we need to create inclusive and supportive workplaces where, as we say at DOL, people can bring their whole selves to work.

This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. I can’t think of a better place to celebrate the anniversary than right here with all of you to celebrate your seventy-fifth anniversary. Like other civil rights legislation that came before it, the ADA renewed and advanced our nation’s founding ideal of equality for all by prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities in all aspects of community life, including most especially, employment. The passage of the ADA and the progress that we have made over the past quarter-century would not have been possible without the vigorous advocacy of organizations like NFB. Yet in many ways employment is the unfinished business of the ADA. Simply put, the employment gap between Americans with and without a disability is unacceptable. Last week we released the job numbers for the month of June, and the unemployment rate among people with disabilities was 9.3 percent, which is down from 12.9 percent a year ago. Now before you start clapping, let me say that while the downward trend is positive, it’s less positive when you compare it to the unemployment rate of 5.3 percent for people without a disability. More concerning is the labor force participation rate among people with a disability. It’s only 20 percent, and compare that to the almost 70 percent labor force participation of people without a disability.

We know at the Department of Labor that the groundwork that the ADA laid is not finished, that there remains more work to be done in order to create a more perfect society. That is why my boss, Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, and I often refer to the Department of Labor as the Department of Opportunity. We work hard to provide opportunities to Americans to contribute fully to our nation’s workforce because we believe that America does best when we field a full team, and we can’t afford to leave anyone on the sidelines.

Especially in 2015, when we have such an array of fantastic technological advancements, we can no longer say that someone can’t do what they need to do in the workplace. As an example, I know of a young woman named Helen Chang. Helen is a web developer with a multinational technology services corporation, and she spends the majority of her time writing code for computer applications. Her employer is a federal contractor, and she works with the company’s defense division, which services the US Department of Defense—pretty important stuff. It doesn’t matter that Helen is blind because she can do this important work thanks to cutting-edge accessible technology, which is one of the great equalizers in today’s world of employment.

When other young people with visual impairments ask Helen for advice on pursuing a high-tech career, she tells them to be open to learning new technologies and software—anything that will be helpful to you in order to be successful in your job. So our mission at the Department of Labor is to help people like Helen bring their whole selves to work.

Let me spend a few minutes telling you how we’re doing that. First, we are working hard on the implementation of the new Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act or WIOA. This landmark bipartisan legislation is the first update to the nation’s workforce development system in over fifteen years, and it amends and reauthorizes crucial programs to help jobseekers access the services they need in employment and match employers with skilled workers. In addition to prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities in services and programs, WIOA includes a specific focus on increasing competitive, integrated employment opportunity for people with disabilities, including the most significant disabilities. To that end WIOA established a committee to make recommendations to the secretary of labor and Congress on how best to accomplish this goal. This advisory committee is already hard at work, having met three times since January, and we look forward to receiving the recommendations of this advisory committee about how to move forward. Just this week we also released a guide for all 2,500 American Job Centers around the country on how to better support persons with disabilities in helping them prepare for and find work. If any of you are looking for a job or know someone who is looking for a job, I hope you will consider our American Job Network first. We are in almost every community in the country, and the people who staff these centers are experts. In the Department of Labor we also have a civil rights agency called the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, or OFCCP, that is tasked with protecting workers, promoting diversity, and enforcing laws to prohibit discrimination and take affirmative action. Last year we demonstrated that commitment to increasing access when we implemented long-overdue updates to regulations implementing Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act. As you may know, Section 503 establishes an aspirational 7 percent utilization goal for the employment of qualified individuals with disabilities. This law encourages federal contractors to proactively recruit and retain qualified people with disabilities. The basis for 503 is quite simple: contracting with the federal government is not a right; it is a privilege, and that privilege should only be extended to companies who try to make the workforce reflect the diversity of our country, and that includes hiring and retaining people with disabilities.

While the ADA leveled the playing field for people with disabilities in many ways, we all know that there is much work that remains. One of those areas is accessible technology. I know this particular issue is near and dear to people in this room, and I certainly don’t need to tell you of the barriers that inaccessible technology poses to people in the workplace. That’s why yesterday—just yesterday—I visited a company in the suburban Virginia area just outside Washington, DC. The company is called SSB BART, and I had the opportunity to spend an hour with an extraordinary technology expert named Sam Joel. Sam is blind, yet he provides critical assistance to government agencies and major corporations around the country about how they can make their websites more accessible to the visually impaired. Sam did this wonderful demonstration—and I’ve got to tell you, I’m not a tech person—I was completely blown away by what Sam showed me. He took a website—and I’ll be honest; he had a website already ready, but I said to him, “Take the United States Department of Labor website. I want you to scan our website and see how we’re doing.”

So he scans the digital content of any website—it happens in like twenty or thirty seconds—and he can instantly look at where the flaws are in the website. He and his company make recommendations to the clients about what ought to be adjusted, and they make those adjustments. In just that one hour I spent with Sam, I was inspired by the tenacity and dedication that he brought to his job. The work that he is doing is cutting-edge—it’s cutting-edge in any industry, and the fact that he is visually impaired is immaterial. The work that he is doing is transformative for all people.

We at the department want to do more to support what Sam and his colleagues at SSB BART are doing. That’s why we’ve created a new effort called the Partnership on Employment and Accessible Technology. We call it PEAT. This is a multifaceted initiative to advance the employment, retention, and career advancement of people with disabilities through accessible technology. I want everyone in this room to consider yourself in the PEAT effort, because at the core of PEAT is a commitment to dialogue, collaboration, and action. You can access PEAT online at <peatworks.org>, and we’ve created a user-friendly web portal that will make it easy for you to learn about and actively engage in issues related to accessible technology in employment. There are educational articles, webinars, interactive online tools—resources that are intended to provide incentives to businesses to create more inclusive IT practices.

We at the Department of Labor are your partners. We want to be close partners with all of you because, while we celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ADA, we know that there is much more work to be done. We know that the promise of the ADA has yet to be fulfilled, and we believe at its core what this is about is increasing opportunity for all people.

This really is about the American dream. I am the child of immigrants; my parents came to this country seeking a better life. They came to this country because of the enduring value of the American dream: the very simple idea that, if you are willing to work hard, you can get ahead. Unfortunately our neighbors, our friends, our family members with disabilities want to work hard and aren’t given the chance to do so. That’s why I am motivated; that’s why my boss, Secretary Tom Perez, is motivated each morning to get up and work for people like you in this room.

Twenty-five years ago when President Bush signed the ADA on the South Lawn of the White House, he did so a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he said this at the signing ceremony: “And now I sign legislation which takes a sledgehammer to another wall, one which has for too many generations separated Americans with disabilities from the freedom they could glimpse but not grasp. Once again, we rejoice as this barrier falls for claiming together we will not accept, we will not excuse, we will not tolerate discrimination in America.”
Thank you to all of you at NFB for being our partners to create a more perfect union. It is truly an honor to be here with you today.

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