The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Bureau of International Labor Affairs has released “Reducing Child Labor and Forced Labor: A Toolkit for Responsible Businesses,” the first guide developed by the U.S. government to help businesses combat child labor and forced labor in their global supply chains. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), worldwide there are 215 million children in child labor, with 115 million performing hazardous work. It also estimates that 21 million people are in forced labor, six million of them children.

Using the DOL’s toolkit should help employers reduce “the chance that your products—and the raw materials they come from—are manufactured, mined or harvested by children who should be in school, or by workers locked in sweatshops or forced into work through false promises or threats.” read more…

By Tammy Binford

Government statistics show that unemployment among people with disabilities is far higher than unemployment for people without disabilities. Year-end figures for 2011 are not yet available, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has figures revealing that the 2010 unemployment rate for people with disabilities was 14.8 percent. That’s more than one and a half times higher than the rate for people without disabilities, which was 9.4 percent.

What may be more startling than the unemployment rate is the number of people with disabilities who aren’t even in the labor force at all. According to data published in December by the BLS, 79.2 percent of working-age individuals with disabilities are outside the labor force, compared to 30.5 percent of those without disabilities.

Now the federal government is trying to take steps to narrow the employment gap between those with and without disabilities by proposing that federal contractors and subcontractors set a hiring goal of having seven percent of their workforces be made up of people with disabilities. read more…

In 1945, Congress declared the first week in October “National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week.” In 1962, the word “physically” was removed in acknowledgment of individuals with all types of disabilities. In 1988, Congress expanded the week to a month and changed the name to “National Disability Employment Awareness Month” (NDEAM). This year, the Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) has designated “Talent Has No Boundaries: Workforce Diversity Includes People with Disabilities” as the theme of NDEAM.

Disabled Workers Important to Economy

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