Hire a Deaf Person? Nah, I'll Pay the Fine Instead.
Tuesday July 1, 2008
Last week, the Washington Post reported that in Russia, employers are paying fines for not hiring disabled people instead of hiring them. Here is the fifth paragraph from the article, "Russia Looks for Ways to End Isolation, Invisibility of Disabled:"
Halfhearted attempts to encourage the employment of the disabled by setting quotas for businesses have faltered. Most employers preferred to pay the low fines for failing to meet quotas rather than actually hire disabled people, according to advocates for people with disabilities.The article does not specifically mention deaf people, but we can assume that the disabled category includes deaf people.
And we think deaf people in the United States have difficulty finding jobs? Imagine if our situation were like Russia's. How many deaf Americans would have jobs if employers had quotas but could avoid hiring deaf people by paying small fines instead?
Comments
That is interesting, especially since they don’t have to hire interpreters or anything like that. I met a few Deaf Russians, and they told me how they attend college without an interpreter. They have no residual hearing, so they have to lipread their professors! Yikes!
I wonder how high the fines would have to be before companies would start hiring disabled people.
Well, United States and some other countries are doing the asme attitude as Russia.
Look at Hitler’s Germany in World War II treated disabilites like Russia and United States. History already spoke itself repeatly.
One question remains unanswered. How many percentage of deaf persons affected by this is actually qualified for this or that job?
Snickering -
Look at US House of Representative under Committee Education and Labor website!!!
http://edlabor.house.gov/issues/adaaa.shtml
One of their statement in their website is ANSWER your question: “THE RESULT: In 2004, plaintiffs lost 97% of ADA employment discrimination claims, often due to the interpretation of definition of disability. People who are not hired or are fired because an employer mistakenly believes they cannot perform the job – or because the employer does not want “people like that” in the workplace – have been denied protection from employment discrimination due to these court decisions. This was not the intent of the ADA.”
That is really sad indeed!
It is difficult, even here, when those of us with disabilities, (I am not deaf, but have other disabilities), run into employment problem. So often it is easy for employer to not hire, or to terminate someone “with cause”, and at that point ADA doesn’t matter any more. Fortunately, I now work for a company that hires ONLY disabled people who work out of our homes. My disability is fully disclosed, and must be reviewed and documented anually, not hidden for fear of it causing me my job.