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t is estimated that there are 43 million Americans with disabilities. Many of these citizens are significantly unemployed or underemployed compared with their nondisabled peers. This is true despite the fact that it has been a decade since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits disability discrimination. This article describes the role of employers, management, and especially the HR professionals in minimizing disability discrimination. Findings from a recent study of private-and federal-sector employers (Bruyère, 2000) 1 point to ways to successfully minimize the negative consequences of disability both for the individual and the workplace.
According to Burkhauser, Daly, and Houtenville (2000), using the Current Population Survey (CPS) for working-age civilians in 1998, 34 percent of men and 30 percent of women with work disabilities were employed during that year, compared with 95 percent of men and 81percent of women without work disabilities. Men and women with disabilities also worked fewer hours on the average (approximately one-third less) than those without disabilities. 2 This disparity represents a significant loss to business of willing and able talent, as well as loss of income and social and economic participation for people with disabilities. It is a function of inequity that has permeated social policy, access to education, training, and employment, as well as of society's attitudes. To address the disparity, in 1990 Congress passed disability nondiscrimination legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which affords protections in employment, access to goods and services, and public accommodations. Federal government agencies and federal contractors have been covered by similar civil rights legislation for people with disabilities since the passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.