The conflict between the threat of a government shutdown and cuts to contractor wages is affecting one group of workers perhaps more than any other: people with disabilities. Dwight Davis, president of the Alliance for Expanding the American Workforce, joined Tom Temin on the federal campaign and discussed some of his current concerns.
Tom Temin: Tell us about Alliance First, the Alliance for Expanding America’s Workforce, a group of businesses that employ people with disabilities.
Dwight Davis: Yes. That’s right. It was founded by five people involved in the Ability One program, which is a contracting program that uses federal funds to hire people with disabilities on service contracts that would otherwise be spent. But instead of relying on other for-profit companies, the nonprofits do this with the goal of hiring a significant number of people with severe disabilities in federal jobs. There are about 40,000 people working in the Ability One program. The Alliance was founded to be a voice for nonprofits and other for-profit companies in this field, to strengthen Section 501 and Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act and to lobby both the Department of Defense and the federal government to hire more people with severe disabilities through contract pools. It is also to work with the Small Business Administration to consider disability entrepreneurship as part of their socio-economic allocation program and to modernize and expand the Ability One program.
Tom Temin: You’re also the president of one of the companies with global connections in employment. So tell us a little bit about your company.
Dwight Davis: Yes, our global employment connection has been going for nearly 40 years now. It’s been 38 years, and I’ve been president for a little over two years, and we employ about 1,500 people across the country, in 14 states from Alaska to Florida to the District of Columbia. Over 1,000 of those people are severely disabled. We do everything from food service, workplace cleaning, facilities management and maintenance to information technology operations and business management support for the federal government and commercial entities.
Tom Temin: So how did you end up having a pretty strong and enduring interest in this particular field of employment?
Dwight Davis: As a military man, I worked in military operations and actually, there were people who did a lot of the administrative work, even the maintenance of my aircraft, while working in military operations. I had no idea that these contracts were reserved for AbilityOne, people with severe disabilities, until the AbilityOne program. I felt very strongly that the dignity of work should be applied equally to everyone. Currently, only 21% of people with severe disabilities are actually working, which is a small percentage of people with severe disabilities compared to the rest of the population, which is 64%. Studies have shown that by hiring people with disabilities, you don’t have to pay social security benefits or taxes, and the spending boosts the economy, giving the government about $38,000 back. So it’s become a bit of a passion project for me to focus on this.
Tom Temin: Right. You talk about the threat of a government shutdown. We’ve been putting that off for a few weeks now. And of course, all contractors are scared because we don’t know exactly what Congress and the uncertainty is going to bring. But do you feel that this threat, an actual shutdown or budget disruption, is going to affect people with disabilities in a way that’s perhaps amplified more than other kinds of workers?
Dwight Davis: Absolutely. Generally, families that have someone with a severe disability, we did a survey again and found that having a person with a disability costs the family about $17,000 a year in excess expenses. A person with a disability may have additional medical needs, psychological needs, etc. that they need to live a normal life. So taking away wages is a threat in itself. But the other element is uncertainty. One of the ways these contracts work is that they are very long-term contracts. This provides a lot of stability to our employee base. So when there is a threat that they may not be able to work, it adds extra stress. And a lot of these employees can’t stand that kind of stress. So our team has to spend a lot of extra time assuring our employees that we’re doing everything we can to keep them employed, or at least pay them, during the uncertainty. But believe it or not, a lot of our employees are deemed essential personnel and so they have to come to work without a guarantee of pay. Speaking on behalf of my company, Global Connections to Employment, we’re going to do everything we can to keep them paid on a regular basis and make sure their families don’t suffer. But there’s no guarantee that our company will get paid. We’re a pretty large nonprofit, so we can absorb that a little bit, but some of the smaller organizations that employ people in areas where employment is probably their only option, some of them wouldn’t be able to survive a long shutdown. The last one was 36 days. So there’s no guarantee that we’ll be compensated.
Tom Temin: Yes.
Dwight Davis: It really does. It turns their world upside down.
Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Dwight Davis, who is the president of the American Workforce Expansion Alliance and one of its member companies, Global Connections to Employment. This relates to one of the questions I wanted to ask you when we talk about people with disabilities. And that includes not only physical disabilities like paralysis or blindness, but also people with neurodiversity and intellectual disabilities.
Dwight Davis: Absolutely. In fact, the majority of our workforce is neurodiverse or intellectually disabled. So they really need stability to perform. And we want to maintain a stable workforce with the threat of these closures. Closures turn their world upside down. I can’t stress this enough.
Tom Temin Besides the interruption of work, the question is how much pay you actually get paid. Many contractors with non-disabled employees are focusing on the fact that federal pay goes up in the federal budget and military pay goes up, but there is nothing in the budget to adjust for price increases for contractor personnel under service contracts and none is likely to appear in ’24. I’m not sure about ’25 yet, but are you arguing that the Fair Pay for Federal Contractors Act would also help employees?
Dwight Davis: Absolutely. First of all, you get paid, you don’t know if your job will continue, but you still get paid. Civilian employees of the Department of Defense are paid during the shutdown, just like federal employees. So, they might have a period of reprieve before they get paid, but they get paid. That’s not the case with contractors. And again, the vast majority of the people we hire on these contracts are in basic minimum wage jobs like food service and cleaning services, all of which are considered important and essential to the Department of Defense. But they’re in the minimum wage category, which means they have less room to absorb long periods of unpaid work. And then, many of them are on Social Security benefits, but those benefits only give them a certain amount of income or a certain amount of assets, so they can’t work, they can’t put money in their bank accounts as much as someone who isn’t disabled, so they have less to fall back on.
Tom Temin: Yes, that’s correct. And a related question that just occurred to me: As an administration, as the Office of Management and Budget and others, the Office of Management and Budget is trying to get more federal employees into the offices, and into the offices themselves, so in theory the buildings become busier places. Is that affecting the hiring demand for those employers who are doing the cleaning and staff support work in the offices?
Dwight Davis: Absolutely. In fact, the demand is up, but the contract amounts are not going up. So we’re looking at innovative ways to help our customers realize they need more cleaning. In terms of cleaning when we bring people back to the office, when remote work went ahead, the service levels went down and the contract amounts were fair. They’re trying to increase cleaning again, but they don’t have the funds, they don’t have a stable budget that allows them to do that. We’ve had several executive orders to increase the federal minimum wage, and we call it the “compression problem.” So the minimum wage for direct labor has gone up. The money for the people who supervise them has not gone up. This is a cost that is borne by the companies that do this work. And we’re a nonprofit in this field. So, again, I don’t have a mountain of cash reserves to make this happen. The contract amounts are not going up, and the budgets are relatively flat, if not declining, in these areas. So, again, I think about stability. In a stable environment, you know that no matter what happens to the federal government, these people are going to be paid to keep working. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, astronauts still need to be fed. Their offices still need to be maintained. Their bases, their facilities still need to be maintained. And we provide information technology support to the federal government for security background checks for the Department of Defense. People with disabilities do that work. And that has to continue. These are critical functions, but these people are really in a tough spot because they don’t know if they’re going to get paid at the end of it.
Tom Temin Dwight Davis is president of the Alliance for Expanding America’s Workforce and CEO of its member company, Global Connections to Employment. Thank you so much for joining us.
Dwight Davis: My pleasure. Tom, I think it’s only natural that you have the opportunity to provide this information on a very small, little-known project like the Ability One program.
Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users within the European Economic Area.