A new report by the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) shows a 9% increase in federal employees with disabilities, resulting from initiatives to make new hires from this underserved population and to encourage existing workers to voluntarily disclose their status.
In his blog post for The Federal Times, Stephen Losey quotes a portion of OPM director John Berry’s letter to President Obama that accompanied the report (PDF), which said the increase means there are more federal employees with disabilities both in terms of total numbers (up to 204,189 in 2011 from 187,313 in 2010) and percentage (up to 11% from 10.7%) than at any time during the past generation.
Losey goes on to say that the new figures validate the effectiveness of President Obama’s plan to increase the number of government employees with disabilities; which includes a 2010 executive order to make 100,000 new hires from this population by the year 2015. The lone commenter to the post thus far, identified only as “FedHRXpert,” takes exception with this conclusion:
We annually see an increase in PWDs employed but this is NOT DUE to their being NEW HIRES. Many employees develop disabilities as they age and I was able to discern the actual number of employees simply updating their disability status from NONE to disabled from the count of new hires with PWDs. The percentage and number of new counted PWDs by far was the direct result of simply updating our employee profiles — NOT the result of hiring of PWDs!
While FedHRXpert incorrectly begins the refutation by addressing “Mr. Berry” — who makes no such claim about the efficacy of the efforts other than putting the number in context — the commenter’s point is substantiated by a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which said that, at just 20,000 new hires in the first two years, the federal government is lagging well behind its goal and questions the methodology and training by which the program is being implemented.
But even if one is in full agreement with FedHRXpert’s parsing of the data, most advocates for increasing job opportunities for people with disabilities would be happy with the sum total gains achieved through the simple act of self-identification by existing government employees. Back in March, the director of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) told The Wall Street Journal that encouraging a work environment where employees felt comfortable merely disclosing their disability on an anonymous survey would be a step in the right direction. A May 7 guest post from Mathew McCullough on the Disability.gov blog that we have cited here on more than one occasion explains the importance of disclosure thusly:
… [L]ess than two percent of federal employees have been identified as people with disabilities. Granted, I do believe that the percentage of federal employees with disabilities is actually slightly higher due to President Obama’s commitment to increasing federal employment of individuals with disabilities (Executive Order 13548), but I understand why the findings are so dismal… Toleration or having a sense of being tolerated is probably the worst type of division that all people with disabilities and different cultural backgrounds experience at one time or another. Due to the fact that there is such a stigma to being classified as an individual with a disability, the less than two percent statistic is not surprising at all, as many federal employees may not disclose that they have a disability.
In that context, the 9% jump of the number of federal employees who have disabilities is indeed an endorsement of the success of the current administration’s approach. But there also needs to be real job creation to persuade the FedHRXperts of the world that the approach is actually generating progress.
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Image by U.S. Dept. of Labor, used under its Creative Commons license.