Disabled Workers - Valuable Resource Treated Like Pond Scum

I'll never forget one day at a start-up. The CEO was designing a new company building. He was ranting, raving about elevators, storming up and down the halls, on his phone. He was talking to his attorney, demanding to find a legal way to not have an elevator in the new building. Why? Supposedly to save costs, but also to deny a disabled applicant needing an elevator, due to being in a wheelchair, a job. He spent thousands of dollars on attorney fees, studying the law, all to avoid putting in an elevator.

With that, I give you this Wall Street Journal article, Disabled Face Sharply Higher Jobless Rate:

The government's first detailed look at disabled workers' employment shows they are far more likely than the overall work force to be older, working part-time or jobless.

The average unemployment rate for disabled workers was 14.5% last year, the Labor Department said Wednesday, well above the 9% rate for those without disabilities. By the Labor Department's count, there were roughly 27 million Americans 16 years or older with a disability last year.

The employment situation doesn't appear to have improved this year: The unemployment rate for those with disabilities had risen to 16.4% as of July.

This is the first time the government has looked closely at the employment situations of such workers. The study, for instance, found those with disabilities were three times as likely as those without to be 65 or older. Nearly a third of workers with disabilities worked only part-time, compared with about a fifth of those without disabilities.

Disabled workers with more education were more likely to be employed than those with less—a characteristic they share with the larger work force. But at all levels of education, people with disabilities had higher unemployment rates. The jobless rate for workers with disabilities who had at least a bachelor's degree was 8.3%— higher than the 4.5% rate for college-educated workers without disabilities.

Only 1 in 5 disabled people have jobs. The unemployment rate is 60% higher for those with disabilities.

In 2009, the employment-population ratio — the proportion of the population that is employed — was 19.2 percent for persons with a disability. Among those with no disability, the ratio was much higher (64.5 percent). For all age groups, persons with a disability were much less likely to be employed than those with no disability. The latest unemployment rate of persons with a disability is 14.5 percent. These statistics were obtained from the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey that provides statistics on employment and unemployment in the United States.

Oh the start-up? Long gone. Just another outrage in a sea of Dot Con implosions. Of course the CEO got over $3 million anyway.

The building is still there of course and still does not have an elevator.

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new unemployment claims 08-26-10

31,000 to 473,000, from last week's 500k. I'm not writing it up because there is so much noise in weeklies and you can bet they will be revised signficantly.

Bottom line, initial claims just ain't below 400k and really ain't below 330k, which is where we need it to be for some damn job growth.