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Governor appeals for more jobs for the disabled
The Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten, today (Thursday) urged the community to do more to improve job opportunities for the disabled.
Speaking at the second Summit Meeting on Open Employment for People with a Disability, the Governor said that while good progress had been made since the first summit a year ago, more should be done to tackle the question of enhancing the employment prospects of the disabled.
"The work is not done; it is just beginning," he declared.
The meeting, at which three Policy Secretaries pledged support for the worthy cause, was attended by some 100 representatives of employers associations and disabled groups.
Referring to a recent survey by the University of Hong Kong on the employment of the disabled, the Governor said while he would not go along with all the methodology in that report and did not accept that the unemployment figures for the disabled were as high as suggested, he agreed that the report made a very valid point: there were many disabled persons who could work, who wished to work but who did not work.
"We must do more for these people," he asserted.
He noted that 37 employers had responded to the proposal at last year's summit to set voluntary targets for employing disabled persons and, as a result, 302 additional employment opportunities would be made available for disabled persons by next year.
"We hope to increase the new job opportunities to 500 by March 1997," the Governor said.
Also speaking at the meeting, the Secretary for Education and Manpower, Mr Michael Leung, said a record 1,414 disabled people were placed in open employment last year by the Labour Department's Selective Placement Division (SPD) while the Employees Retraining Board had spent $8 million to provide training for 819 disabled workers in 31 courses.