disability hiring

In today’s Federal Newscast, the Labor Department is looking to reward four contractors who make an effort to hire qualified disabled people.

Experts from the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission and the Employer Assistance and Resource Network held a Twitter chat on April 19 to discuss problems and solutions in implementing a rule regarding the hiring of people with disabilities.

Federal employees with disabilities made up 14.4 percent of the workforce in fiscal 2015, an improvement over 2014’s 13.6 percent. Agencies also hired more employees with disabilities, 26,466 new hires compared with 20,618 new hires in 2014. The latest report from the Office of Personnel Management on the topic shows record disability hiring among agencies over the past 35 years.

The government is getting ready to declare a big win at the end of next month. It looks likely to reach a goal of hiring 100,000 people with disabilities within five years. President Barack Obama set that target in a July 2010 executive order. The Office of Personnel Management’s special adviser on disabilities, Michael Murray, tells Federal News Radio’s Emily Kopp what happened next.

Four years after a push from the President, the federal government is hiring employees with disabilities at a rate that’s higher than it’s been in decades, according to a new report from the Office of Personnel Management.

Jenny Yang has been the EEOC’s new chairwoman only for two months, but she’s already outlined her overarching goal: to make it easier for agencies to hire employees with disabilities, and increase their overall number. Yang also used National Disability Employment Awareness Month to start immediately improving the hiring process.

About 12 percent of federal employees say they have disabilities. The hiring of more has become a focal point of the Obama administration. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just wrapped up a month of focusing on this issue, during which it published guidance for agencies, hosted a Twitter town hall and launched a new data collection effort. New EEOC Chairwoman Jenny Yang told Federal News Radio’s Emily Kopp the agency is trying to help the government be a model employer of people with disabilities, while it does a better job itself.

The Labor Department unveiled two final rules Tuesday requiring federal contractors to establish clear-cut annual benchmarks for hiring veterans and people with disabilities.

In a July 2010 executive order, President Barack Obama pushed agencies to hire more people with disabilities, aiming for 100,000 workers by 2015. Agencies have made steady progress toward that goal. However that progress could be in jeopardy: Complaints alleging disability discrimination in federal hiring and appointments have ticked upward over the past five years, according to an analysis by the law firm Tully Rinckey.

The federal government’s hiring process has long been plagued with a poor reputation. However, since President Barack Obama issued an executive memo in 2010, the Office of Personnel Management has taken great strides to streamline the hiring process as well as to incorporate other reforms to make it easier to hire recent college graduates, people with disabilities and veterans. Federal News Radio spoke about this with Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, as part of the special report, The Obama Impact: Evaluating the Last Four Years.