America’s largest drugstore chain continued its commitment to employing people with disabilities with Monday’s announcement of a new customer service training program, the National Retail Employees with Disabilities Initiative (REDI). According to the press release, Walgreens has operated a pilot version of the REDI program in Texas for the past couple of years. Following its [...]
A new research study from professors at Washington University in St. Louis published last week in Pediatrics shows one in three young adults with autism are not prepared for life after high school; putting a spotlight on the lack of post-secondary job training and employment opportunities for these particular individuals with disabilities. The abstract for [...]
Buying American is starting to gain the same momentum that it had in the 1980s thanks to media focus on the issue from outlets like ABC and its “Made in America” series, plus “America Revealed” on PBS. A couple of recent stories by local media outlets are showing how people with disabilities in contract service [...]
A guest blogger on the Office of Disability Employment Policy website is urging businesses to promote a culture that would encourage employees with disabilities to voluntarily identify themselves as such, in an effort to promote workplace fairness and diversity, as well as encourage businesses to add even more individuals with disabilities to their payroll. Mathew [...]
Small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy. Some variation of that sentence will be uttered approximately 14,926 times between now and Election Day in November. Keeping the entrepreneurial engine operating efficiently means keeping costs under control and maximizing the return on investment from every employee hired. Awareness that both of these goals can [...]
“Lackluster,” “meager,” and “disappointing” are just three adjectives used in headlines reporting on the unemployment report released by the U.S. Department of Labor last Friday. If you are an individual with a disability, however, you may be picking a different description. Because the unemployment rate for this subset of the population bucked the national trend, [...]
New Jersey’s Daily Journal published an op-ed by Department of Human Services Commissioner Jennifer Velez following Governor Chris Christie’s announcement of the state’s new “Employment First” policy for people with disabilities, where “benefits become the safety net that will supplement employment, not the other way around.” No one welcomes this shift in attitude more than [...]
The Arc of Illinois honored Governor Pat Quinn for his efforts to change the state’s approach to people with disabilities by giving him their 2012 President’s Award during last week’s 62nd annual convention. A press release put out by the state said the award was given in recognition of Governor Quinn’s “leadership to improve life [...]
As April draws to a close, the U.S. economy continues to grow, albeit modestly, and more Americans returned to the workforce, albeit slowly. For people with disabilities, the early spring has been a time for planting seeds in hopes for future harvests. Job fairs organized by state agencies are giving them face time with potential [...]
Large, for-profit organizations take a more active approach to recruiting employees with disabilities than smaller businesses or nonprofits. That’s one takeaway from a recent survey published by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Take a look at slides 19-21 in the version of “Employing People with Disabilities: Practices and Policies Related to Recruiting and [...]