February '09
“MAKE IT WORK”
OLD SCHOOL: People with disabilities are institutionalized and written off. NEW SCHOOL: People with disabilities are recognized as untapped talent and hired by forward-thinking employers. In this, Part I of a two part interview, Assistant Labor Secretary Neil Romano talks to ABILITY Magazine about the coming revolution in the American workforce:
People with disabilities are the next great wave of diversity in the United States, and they are about to move forward. The Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) has been talking about that, and I think it’s starting to get some traction. Companies are beginning to realize that people with disabilities have a lot to offer, and it’s time that they take a good, long look at how to hire them, which makes perfect sense to me.
I never assign malevolence to anything that I’ve seen that’s been wrong in the arena of disability. I think sometimes that people try to build this hedge of protection around people who have disabilities, and sometimes it can be so tall that it becomes a form of imprisonment. Perhaps they just don’t believe in people with disabilities.
Sometimes that hits close to home. Here I am, 54 years old, and when I get the call from the White House that I’m going to be nominated for this job, I phone my 84-year-old mother in Brooklyn and say, “Mom, the President has asked me to be the next assistant secretary of labor for disability employment policy.” She gets real quiet, and whispers, “Neil, does he know that you can’t spell?” Which to me was hysterical. It said everything that I was trying to illustrate, and everything that I’m about. People have tended historically to look at disability as the opposite of ability. We focus so much on what people can’t do that we don’t focus on what they can do. Now we’re going after businesses and saying, “You know what? Actually, this group can do a great deal.” So we’ve started to turn the corner on that, and we’re working very hard.
Things have changed dramatically in the last 20 years. People with disabilities are now better educated, and expect more from their educations. They’re saying, “We want to work more.” America is at a very good point in history, because companies need more skilled workers and people with disabilities now have better education, better preparedness and higher expectations. These factors converging are good for people with disabilities and good for the country.
Technology is part of it: It gives us the opportunity to have computers and systems that can level the playing field. I tell people all the time that I owned a company where, for years, I had people do my typing because of my dyslexia. I had people read and answer my email for me, because my greatest fear was that I would be perceived as someone who wasn’t smart. My life changed the day that I discovered spell check. When I sold my business and started working independently, I could sit and write without fear of how people would perceive my written business materials.
The rest of this article can be found in the current ABILITY Magazine with Robert Patri on the cover at: www.ABILITYMagazine.com
Reprint of this article was provided by Chet Cooper, Publisher of ABILITY Magazine.