Assumption: A person with mental retardation cannot be trained to
perform a job as well as an employee without a disability.
Fact: Over two thirds of Pizza Hut employees have mental retardation.
The average turnover rate (the rate at which workers quit) of these employees is
a modest twenty percent compared to a one hundred and fifty percent turnover of
employees without disabilities.
It is this kind of thinking that limits the ability of people with
disabilities to find employment more than any other factor. In an E-Mail on
Thursday, November 7, 1996, Barbara Sommer, Disabilities Employment Coordinator
for the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission, stated, "The most significant
barrier to employment for [people with disabilities] truly is attitude." One way
to show the effects of discrimination of people with disabilities in the
workplace is to show ways people with disabilities are discriminated against and
to show what is being done to stop this raping of the human heart.
Got a weight problem? Sure, there are a lot of diets you could try, but
why not exercise your right as a victim and strike back at discriminatory
employers? You might not lose any weight ,but at least you can get the job you
deserve. This is possible because of the courts and the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission wants to extend protections under the 1973 Rehabilitation
Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act to obese people. In December of 1993
a Federal Appeals Court ruled unanimously to uphold an order that required the
state of Rhode Island to pay $100,000 in damages to a 320-lb. woman for not
hiring her and then ordered that she be hired as an attendant at a mental
retardation facility. The EEOC said, "It is not necessary that a condition be
involuntary or immutable to be covered." In September of 1993, California's
Supreme Court ruled that a ...