COUNTYWIDE : Disabled to Gain From Jobs Law

Although Goodwill Industries of Orange County collects, cleans, repairs and sells discarded items, the agency’s real commodity is jobs. For decades Goodwill has been providing job training and placement for disabled people.

Goodwill officials say they do not encounter much discrimination from potential employers, but they are anticipating a greater interest in hiring the disabled as a result of the Americans With Disabilities Act signed into law by President George Bush last month.

The landmark act prohibits discrimination in employment, public accommodations, transportation and telecommunications, and it requires that businesses with more than 25 employees be able to reasonably accommodate disabled workers within two years.

“We haven’t seen an outpouring of people calling, but some people have requested information,” said Tino Rivera, one of several job developers who help program graduates with the nuts and bolts of finding a job. “Now that there’s more of an openness about hiring disabled people, employers are starting to respond.”

Brenda Premo, executive director of the Dayle McIntosh Center for the Disabled, an Anaheim-based service and advocacy organization for the disabled, said she thinks the act will help both employers and disabled people seeking jobs.

“A lot of disabled people really want to work,” Premo said. “I think that employers will be pleasantly surprised by hiring domebody who wants to work.”

Employees and clients learning job skills at Goodwill’s headquarters in Santa Ana sort giant bins of donated clothing and other items, make phone calls, type on word processors and assemble everything from airplane parts to heart-monitoring equipment.

“We are probably the most diverse job training program in Orange County,” said Andrea Pronk, Goodwill’s director of public relations. The agency places more than 100 people in jobs each year, she said.

While the unemployment rate is only about 3% in Orange County, it is 20% among disabled people who are willing and able to work, said Goodwill President George Kessinger.

“People with disabilities are often underemployed,” Kessinger said. “That is, they are doing jobs that require less skills than they have.”

At Goodwill, 50% of the 350 employees are disabled.

Loenda Grover of Fullerton was hired to do clerical work at Goodwill after going through the job training program. Although Grover has a crisp, professional manner and adeptly juggles the agency’s multiple phone lines, she said she thinks discrimination might have played a role in her rejection for positions at several other companies.

“I think they were discriminating. I don’t think they knew what my problem was,” said Grover, who has dyslexia, an impairment of the ability to read.

Goodwill and others who work with the disabled say making workplace adjustments for them is often simple and inexpensive.

Sometimes it is enough to install a new light in an office, build a wooden ramp or just lower a sign on a door, Pronk said.

“Hiring disabled people makes sense,” Premo said. ‘We’ve got to support them one way or another. . . . Currently federal and state governments pay $200 million a year in California to support disabled people. . . . If you get the person a job and they’re productive, they’ll be able to pay part of their own support. And the person is doing something worthwhile by contributing.”

To find out what kind of changes might be required to accommodate someone with a particular disability, employers can call a toll-free database at (800) 526-7234.