Clinton: Hire, promote people with disabilities

President Clinton has issued a memorandum to federal agency heads calling for more intense efforts to recruit and promote people with disabilities.

Clinton exhorted agencies to implement plans to promote people with disabilities into the government's upper management ranks, offer more internships to disabled students and assist in disabled workers' career development.

"Today I'm releasing the first-ever government plan to ensure positive career paths for people with disabilities in our federal workforce," Clinton said Saturday in his weekly radio address to the nation. "We are the nation's largest employer. I want it to be a model for private industry, and this plan will help to do just that."

The Office of Personnel Management released the plan, "Accessing Opportunity: The Plan for Employment of People with Disabilities in the Federal Government," along with a companion guide offering specific methods of improving the recruitment and retention of people with disabilities. Both documents are available on OPM's Web site.

"A limitation of the body or mind does not reduce the potential or drive of the individual," said OPM Director Janice Lachance.

Specific recommendations from the OPM guidance include:

• Evaluate disabled applicants' ability to perform work on a case-by-case basis. Issuing blanket exclusions on groups of disabled workers can prevent an agency from hiring a fully qualified disabled person.
• Contact state-run vocational rehabilitation agencies, the Veterans Affairs Department and colleges and universities (such as Gallaudet University for the deaf in Washington) to identify disabled job candidates.
• Use special authorities in federal hiring law to provide provisional work to disabled people.
• Use special hiring authorities to bring on interpreters and other personal assistants on a full-time, part-time or intermittent basis.
• Modify work spaces in federal facilities to ensure complete access to people with physical disabilities.

According to 1997 OPM statistics, 7.2 percent of the federal workforce is disabled. The government employs about 21,000 severely disabled workers, who make up 1.2 percent of the workforce.

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. On Oct. 13, the Defense Department pledged to increase the percentage of disabled employees in its workforce from 1.4 percent to 2 percent.

The General Services Administration, meanwhile, is working with groups representing thousands of blind and disabled contract workers who may lose their jobs because of the agency's decision to close eight warehouses, which stock many of the goods they produce. GSA has tentatively reversed its decision and is in negotiations with the American Federation of Government Employees on the future of the warehouses. The Clinton administration has pledged to work to drive federal business to the blind and disabled contractors.