DisabilityScoop - "Despite a presidential mandate to increase hiring of people with certain, targeted disabilities, such individuals make up less than 1 percent of the federal workforce, new data shows.
Workers with targeted disabilities constituted 0.88 percent of government employees during the 2010 fiscal year, according to an annual report released Wednesday from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The statistics reflect the inclusion of individuals with intellectual disability, vision and hearing impairments in addition to a handful of other so-called “targeted disabilities” that are at the heart of several federal hiring goals.
Though 554 new employees with targeted disabilities were hired in 2010, the overall participation rate was unchanged from the prior year, the report found. What’s more, numbers fell well short of an EEOC hiring goal of 2 percent.
The inclusion rate for 2010 also paled in comparison to that seen nearly a decade earlier. In 2001, the EEOC found that 1.1 percent of federal employees had targeted disabilities.
President Barack Obama signed an executive order in July 2010 calling for the government to increase employment of people with disabilities. At the time, Obama said the effort was designed to “establish the federal government as a model employer of individuals with disabilities.”
The full impact of the executive order has yet to be seen, however, since it took effect during the time covered by the new report.
Of those with targeted disabilities who were employed by the federal government during the 2010 fiscal year, the EEOC found one bright spot. Average pay for this group inched up to $45,155, just shy of the average for all government employees of $45,771.
The U.S. government is the nation’s largest employer, with a staff of some 2.8 million people.
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