Tucker Mcgiven became excited when he saw one of his favorite amusement parks was looking for employees during a job fair Wednesday at the Mobile Civic Center.

“I’ve been to OWA before,” said Mcgiven, 26, of Spanish Fort, about the Foley amusement park where he hopes to land a job. It was among the more than 50 employers offering job opportunities during the Governor’s Job Fair for Those with Disabilities.

The job fair was the first time the fourth annual event was held in Mobile, and it was first Alabama-based job fair for people with special needs since before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

“Today is a game-changer for a lot of people,” said Alabama Labor Secretary Fitzgerald Washington.

Indeed, the event also represented an opportunity for Alabama to lower a stubbornly high unemployment rate for people with special needs.

Washington said while the state’s overall unemployment rate is at an all-time low of 2.6%, he estimates the rate for people with special needs being “twice as high.”

He, along with Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, attended the job fair and met with some of the employers who were talking to the more than 200 prospective job seekers.

“It’s one of the largest groups sitting on the sidelines right now,” said Ivey, regarding to people with special needs looking to find work. “We hope to have opportunities so folks can get employed.”

National statistics show a growing need for employers to support people with disabilities since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020.

According to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis, there were 1.2 million more people identified has having a disability than there were in 2020. Among those participating in the labor force, there were 496,000 more people with a disability.

In contrast, the number of nondisabled people in the labor force decreased by 34,000 people, according to the BLS.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the labor force hard. From 2020-2021, workers with disabilities lost nearly a million jobs, according to a Forbes Magazine article. That represented a 20% decline, compared to only a 14% decline among workers without disabilities.

“The good thing is we finally have employers coming to us to say, ‘What can we do to hire individuals with disabilities because we don’t have enough workers in the workforce,’” said Jane Elizabeth Burdeshaw, commissioner with the Alabama Department of Rehabilitation Services.

She acknowledged that the unemployment rate is typically “double” among people with special needs than the general population.

“The only way to fix that is to put our resources together and try to have a combined effort to place individuals into employment and then support employers who are hiring them,” said Burdeshaw. She said examples could include ensuring that employers create accessible computer software to support special needs employees.

Washington touted the job fair for creating an awareness to the issue, and he anticipates it helping to further drive down the unemployment rate for people with special needs.

James Tucker, director of the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program, said his organization is “always excited whenever there is meaningful opportunity to look for a job” during job fairs geared toward people with special needs.

But he said that Alabama needs to improve its approach, noting that it has been ranked near the bottom of states for employing people with disabilities.

In 2017, the RespectAbility – a national nonprofit organization supporting opportunities for people with disabilities – ranked Alabama only above West Virginia for providing jobs. According to the group, in 2016, there were 421,135 working-age people with disabilities living in Alabama between the ages of 18 and 64, but only 115,799 of them had jobs. That equated to a 27.5% employment rate for people with disabilities.

“The commissioner’s estimate that people with disabilities have an unemployment rate that is twice the average, I think, woefully underestimates the actual unemployment numbers,” Tucker said. “I think it’s important for the state to look at an event like the job fair as a good starting point for far more work that needs to be done to address this issue.”

He added, “I think this is a perfect time to do that work given the labor shortages that all employers are experiencing.”

Maura Mills, an associate professor in the Department of Management at the Culverhouse College of Business at the University of Alabama, said that outside of job fairs, organizations in Alabama should be proactive in circulating job ads to disability-related organizations and publications.

She also said that after someone with special needs is hired, overall support for them in the workplace is crucial.

“The success really hinges a lot on an employer’s genuine commitment to true disability inclusion in the organization,” said Mills. “If they’re organizing meetings to tackle disability inclusion but hosting them on the 3rd floor of a walk-up building, that’s not inclusion.”

She said if an organization is not “on top of reasonable accommodations” or is not truly inclusive from the top down as a matter or organizational culture, they could face difficulties in retaining employees with special needs.

She said that Disability Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) within an organization or company can be valuable in helping connect employers with a wider community of job candidates for people living with disabilities.

“Recruiting and hiring a diverse workforce that includes individuals living with disabilities is critical, but it’s also not sufficient in and of itself,” Mills said. “Organizations need to keep that momentum going in order to then retain those employees.”