By Walter Olson
One of the Obama administration’s most ambitious and far-reaching regulatory initiatives has thus far received very little notice in the press. In December the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) proposed expanding the government’s affirmative action program for federal contractors (a category that includes most of the nation’s biggest companies) to include various new obligations regarding disabled employees. The most notable of these is a new quota (they deny that it is such, of course, and call it merely a “required … hiring goal”) under which disabled employees are to make up at least 7 percent of a contractor’s workforce. A public comments period expired February 21.
It might appear that the disabled as an interest group are arriving rather late to the affirmative-action scene, but that’s actually not the case. In fact long before the sort of preference by race that came to the fore in the 1960s, the federal government was encouraging its contractors to give preference to disabled job applicants. The practice was envisioned above all as a way to assist wounded war veterans, but also was meant to benefit other disabled persons, most prominently those in the traditional disability groups of blindness, deafness and paraplegia.
In some ways, hiring preference for disabled applicants was de-emphasized after Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. It was imagined that by mandating accommodations such as ramps, Braille and audio subtitles, as well as general private sector nondiscrimination toward the disabled, the ADA would lessen any need for outright favoritism in hiring (which some disabled advocates saw as redolent of demeaning sympathy, anyway). We soon learned better, of course; labor force participation by the disabled plunged rather than rose by comparison with their non-disabled kin.
One of the Obama administration’s most ambitious and far-reaching regulatory initiatives has thus far received very little notice in the press. In December the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) proposed expanding the government’s affirmative action program for federal contractors (a category that includes most of the nation’s biggest companies) to include various new obligations regarding disabled employees. The most notable of these is a new quota (they deny that it is such, of course, and call it merely a “required … hiring goal”) under which disabled employees are to make up at least 7 percent of a contractor’s workforce. A public comments period expired February 21.
It might appear that the disabled as an interest group are arriving rather late to the affirmative-action scene, but that’s actually not the case. In fact long before the sort of preference by race that came to the fore in the 1960s, the federal government was encouraging its contractors to give preference to disabled job applicants. The practice was envisioned above all as a way to assist wounded war veterans, but also was meant to benefit other disabled persons, most prominently those in the traditional disability groups of blindness, deafness and paraplegia.
In some ways, hiring preference for disabled applicants was de-emphasized after Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. It was imagined that by mandating accommodations such as ramps, Braille and audio subtitles, as well as general private sector nondiscrimination toward the disabled, the ADA would lessen any need for outright favoritism in hiring (which some disabled advocates saw as redolent of demeaning sympathy, anyway). We soon learned better, of course; labor force participation by the disabled plunged rather than rose by comparison with their non-disabled kin.
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