Where are the riots in the street?

By Tara Weiss in Forbes:

Despite the technical advances made to help blind employees, there is still a staggering unemployment rate among that population. Several organizations, including the American Foundation for the Blind, put it at 70% among people of employment age, a number that has stayed constant for many years.

“If it were any other constituency with 70% unemployment there would be riots in the street,” says Barry Honig, who is blind and president of Honig International, a Manhattan-based executive search and management consulting firm.

… there are several reasons for it, says Steven Rothstein, president of Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts, Helen Keller’s alma mater. “The single largest factor is discrimination and bias,” he says. “There’s a belief among employers that people who are blind can’t do jobs.”

… This low level of employment raises the question: What can the Americans with Disabilities Act do to protect the blind population? Very little. Employers are under no requirement to hire a certain number of disabled employees.

“Employers are not allowed to check the medical status of a prospective employee until after a job offer has been made,” says Ross Andrews, an employment lawyer in Syracuse, N.Y. “But for the people who have an obvious disability like blindness there’s less protection. If a job offer wasn’t made, the employer can easily say it was for another reason.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 8:45 am and is filed under ADA, NOT2BEMISSED, blindness/visual impairments, discrimination, employment, public attitudes, stereotypes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post