Business Leadership Network Luncheon and Induction Ceremony Remarks by Thomas J. Donohue

On: Business Leadership Network Luncheon and Induction Ceremony
To: Business Leadership Network
From: Thomas J. Donohue
Date: July 9, 2004

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Washington D.C.
July 9, 2004

Thank you very much, Katherine. I'm very pleased to receive this award, but I'm even more excited to see the U.S. Business Leadership Network emerge as a strengthened business organization with a clear identity and purpose: to help employers successfully tap a growing pool of talented and skilled workers, who just happen to have a disability.

For a short stretch, BLN was wandering around in the desert, so to speak, without a home or leadership. In a way, that may have been a good thing, because it gave employers an opportunity to step up and make BLN their own.

Because BLN is now an employer-based organization, the business community will be better able to:

• Influence programs that prepare people with disabilities for the workforce;
• Develop innovative recruiting and hiring techniques and learn from and teach one another in this regard, and;
• Help public agencies that assist people with disabilities to learn about what employers need.

To Katherine, my good friend Tony Coelho, and all the members of the Steering Committee, thank you for your volunteer service and for never losing sight of your goal over the past 15 months. Today marks the end of a critical phase.

To the members of the inaugural Board of Directors, thank you for sacrificing your time and talents to advance what the Steering Committee started.

Today marks the start of a renewed effort to reach employers and educate them on the benefits of including people with disabilities in their workforce and marketplace.

We need these people in our workforce to help close the numbers gap and the skills gap.

With regards to the numbers gap: Even though right now the national public debate is focused on too few jobs and jobs going overseas, the fact remains that we are short of qualified workers in many fields, and the problem will become much more widespread in the years ahead.

Our workforce challenge is being driven by demographics. The aging of America is creating change that is permanent, irreversible, and long term.

Four years ago, there were about 35 million Americans age 65 or older. That figure will double in the next 25 years. Some of your children will live in a day when seniors outnumber people younger than 65.

The candle is burning on both ends. On one end, the nation's birthrate is at its lowest level in nearly a hundred years. On the other end, people are living longer than ever.

We used to abide by a covenant in this country. You worked your whole life, retired, went on a cruise, and died – all by about the age of seventy.

Well, the covenant has been broken. Now people work, retire, go on a cruise, maybe work part-time or find a new career or a new hobby, and then go on another cruise.

These trends pose tremendous challenges for our pay-as-you-go entitlement programs.

How are we going to pay for our retirement and health care needs as the number of beneficiaries grows and the number of people paying into the system declines?

Having the right number of workers is only half the battle – we have to make sure they have the right set of skills. And frankly, we're not there yet.

Only one in five American workers has the skills to meet 21st century jobs, and three out of four have to be retrained just to keep their current positions.

Tapping non-traditional sources of skilled labor is essential to meeting the challenges I've mentioned, and people with disabilities are the most overlooked labor resource available to us.

There are a lot of misconceptions in the business community regarding people with disabilities, such as there aren't many of them eager to join the workforce…they can't do the job…or they require expensive accommodations.

But here are the facts: there are lots of people with disabilities in this country – nearly one in five, in fact. Most of them want to work but don't.

The ones who do are generally dependable, dedicated, hardworking, and productive employees—and an overwhelming majority of them do not require special accommodations.

Our challenge it to dispel the myths and spread the facts, help businesses understand the value of people with disabilities, and give them the tools to reach this critical segment of the population.

There is no organization on a national level that can provide leadership on this issue like the U.S. Business Leadership Network can.

Of course, workforce issues are local in nature, and the work being done by local BLN chapters is indispensable to our goals.

But these local organizations need a strong national entity that can provide leadership and direction…collect and disseminate best practices and lessons learned from around the country…and nurture existing BLN chapters while encouraging the start of new ones.

I can't think of a better group of people to take on this responsibility than the one in this room.

I'm proud to be associated with the U.S. Business Leadership Network, and I promise you that the Chamber, through the Center for Workforce Preparation, will continue its work to advance the goals you've set for yourself.

Thank you very much.