What do Steve Jobs (CEO, Apple Inc.), David Neeleman (Jet Blue Airlines) and Stephen Hawking (Nobel prize physicist) have in common?

They have or have had physical or mental disabilities.

About 22 million Americans ages 21 to 64, or about 13 percent of the working-age population, have a disability. Yet only 38 percent of persons with disabilities are employed, compared with 80 percent of Americans without a disability. Among college graduates, 55 percent of persons with disabilities are employed, compared with 83 percent who do not have a disability, according to the Web site Disabilitystatistics.org.

To help businesses tap into this underutilized talent pool, 10 business representatives from Binghamton, Syracuse, Ithaca, Rochester and Buffalo as well as staff from Cornell and the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce, met at the ILR Conference Center on April 2 to inaugurate the Business Leadership Network (BLN) of CNY. This new chapter of the U.S. Business Leadership Network is co-chaired by Lynette Chappell-Williams, director of Cornell's Office of Workforce Diversity, Equity and Life Quality and Tony Ruiz-Quintanilla, director of the Disability and Business Technical Assistance Center (DBTAC) of Cornell's Employment and Disability Institute in the ILR School.

Started in the mid-1990s as part of the President's Committee on People with Disabilities, BLN has chapters in 32 states to help businesses understand how to hire and retain talented individuals who have a disability (see http://www.usbln.org for more information).

"The BLN exists because there is a dire need to include people with disabilities in the workforce," said Katherine McCary, president of the national organization, via telephone conferencing at the meeting. "U.S. businesses who create the products and services needed to serve those with disabilities have a strong competitive advantage over those businesses that don't."

Myths and fears are the greatest barriers to employing persons with disabilities. Hannah Rudstam, a senior extension associate with DBTAC-NE, told the group that businesses don't gain a competitive advantage by complying with the law regarding disabilities, but by developing a reputation for disability inclusiveness.

"Being among the first to recognize that people with disabilities are diverse, skilled, high-performing workers and engaged employees can become a significant part of your company's business strategy," said Ruiz-Quintanilla.

Rudstam used her business card, printed in Braille, as an example of her organization's commitment to inclusiveness. Web sites, she said, also are an indicator of commitment to persons with disabilities. "If a business organization's Web site or application process is not accessible, then the organization is not accessible," she said.

She also addressed the myth that disability accommodations are expensive, citing a Job Accommodation Network study that found that 49 percent of reasonable accommodations cost nothing and 78 percent cost less than $500. The same study showed that employees who were accommodated were more productive, absent less often and less likely to leave a job.

Rudstam also noted that although age-related disabilities are increasing in the workforce, so are disabilities in war veterans as well as hidden disabilities, such as mental illness, which affect people of all ages. Thus, disability accommodations will become even more important in the years ahead in developing successful talent retention strategies.

For more information about CNY-BLN, contact Laurel Parker at lkp5@cornell.edu or (607) 254-7232 or the DBTAC-NE at dbtacnortheast@cornell.edu or 1-800-949-4232.