By Alyssa Rosenberg
July 25, 2008
Disabled employees represent 0.92 percent of the federal workforce, a decrease of nearly 15 percent since 1997.
"There are laws and regulations [on] the need to go out and hire and recruit people with disabilities," said Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner Christine Griffin, who announced the new statistics on Wednesday at Two Percent by 2010, a conference in Washington. "We have more of a hook, frankly. Our hook is that we actually have laws and regulations that say to the federal government, you need to do a good job in this area. And frankly, despite these laws, we're doing a terrible job."
Griffin and other leaders called on the federal government to set a goal of increasing the representation of disabled people in the workforce to 2 percent by 2010. The three Cabinet-level departments with the highest number of disabled workers are Treasury with 1.73 percent, Veterans Affairs with 1.49 percent and Education with 1.36 percent. Those departments with the fewest disabled employees are Homeland Security with 0.42 percent, Justice with 0.39 percent and State with 0.36 percent.
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0708/072508ar1.htm
