Evaluation of the Ticket to Work Program Initial Evaluation Report

eneficiaries to meet that standard. 3 IDR no longer accepts Tickets from SSI beneficiaries, in
part because of their minimal employment experience. According to ABIL’s director,
sometimes the issue is over-qualification; some clients have had fairly extensive work
experience or advanced skills that make them difficult to place in lower or entry level jobs
that are more readily available. Other times placement is difficult because of the length of
time experienced workers have been out of the labor force.
Discrimination. The director of CCSA believes that people with disabilities still
encounter discrimination. In his experience, individuals with disabilities need twice as many
contacts and ten times the number of interviews to get a job, relative to individuals without
disabilities. He views his marketing role as very important; he needs to “sell” individuals to
an employer and sell the employer to the individual. In conversations with employers, he
does not make specific references to a disability, SSA, or the SVRA. He presents himself as
someone in the legal or personnel profession. When submitting resumes to employers on
behalf of clients, CCSA includes a notice to employers, warning that employment
discrimination against individuals with disabilities is a violation of federal law. He believes
that including warnings in various materials improves placement rates.
2. Helpful Factors
Interviewees were not just focused on the factors that negatively affected their ability to
place Ticket holders in employment. Some cited factors that they believed helped them to
assist beneficiaries in achieving positive employment outcomes. The director of ABIL
identified several such factors: minimal EN competition in the service area; having a
substantial funding base at start-up; a staff made up of people with disabilities who can easily
relate to clients; focusing on placement services rather than VR services; and close
organizational connections to other helpful entities such as a BPAO program, a Center for
Independent Living, the SVRA, and SSA field offices.
Having substantial prior job placement experience, such as Glick and Glick has, may
also be an important factor. Having not just familiarity with the business in general, but also
an extensive network of contacts with employers sounds intuitively significant. Glick and
Glick representatives mentioned that after they started operating as an EN, whenever they
received notice of a job opening, they would look first to their pool of TTW beneficiaries for
a potential candidate, then proceed with their more traditional employee search process.
105
3 The officials were implicitly suggesting that the minimum wage rises more slowly than
the SGA level (currently $810 per month). This is typically the case because the minimum
wage does not necessarily increase annually and is not tied to wage growth as is the SGA
level. The current federal minimum wage rate of $5.15 per hour has been in place since 1997.
V: Case Studies of Eight Experienced TTW Providers