Tapping a Unique Labor Pool
ur People Work" is the motto at Fairfax Opportunities Unlimited (FOU), a nonprofit organization in Alexandria, Va. If you live in the Washington area you may have seen one of its vans taking employees to work, as I did the other day.
These vans may be going to the Commerce or Transportation departments or the Environmental Protection Agency, where FOU staffers handle the mail centers. Or they could be going to the Marine Corps' Henderson Hall in Arlington, Va., to run the food service operations. They may even be driving to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to provide clerical and administrative support.
Every day, vanpools carry commuters to work in the D.C. area and in other major cities across the country, so what's so special about these? It's their riders. They are people with severe disabilities, such as blindness or mental retardation. More than 70 percent of people with disabilities are unemployed or on welfare or receiving other types of federal or community assistance. Programs like FOU provide them the opportunity to contribute to society, and the federal government helps make it happen through its acquisition system.
The 1971 Javits-Wagner-O'Day Act (JWOD) provides the legislative framework for this effort. The JWOD program directs agencies to buy certain products and services from nonprofit organizations that employ the severely disabled.
The Committee for Purchase From People Who Are Blind or Severely Disabled, a tiny federal agency, oversees the program. It operates largely through nonprofit community rehabilitation programs (CRPs) across the country. Nearly 600 of the 1,800 CRPs participate in the Javits-Wagner-O'Day program, offering employment to more than 30,000 people with disabilities. JWOD contracts require 75 percent of the direct labor hours to be performed by disabled employees.
The National Industries for the Blind and NISH, which serves people with other disabilities, provide technical assistance to these community programs. For example, NISH helps the Fairfax program figure out the costs of providing mail center support or running a military mess hall. Since JWOD is a mandatory source program, once an agency contracts with Fairfax Opportunities Unlimited, it can do so on a sole-source basis. Moreover, the contract can be extended indefinitely without further competition.
In some respects, the law seems woefully out of touch with reforms simplify and streamline the acquisition process. The goals have been to make government operate more like a business, to focus on bottom lines and eliminate extraneous costs and requirements. Special-interest programs tend to divert agencies' focus from their real mission.
Yet programs like JWOD remind us that the government is not just a business. The program serves many different purposes that are worthy of the public's support. Agencies get high-quality office supplies or services at fair prices. Taxpayers win because these employees pay income taxes rather than receiving assistance payments. Employees get pride and satisfaction from contributing to their livelihood and to society.
In this era of reform, however, the program has had to change radically to respond to the new marketplace, says Janet Samuelson, president and chief executive officer of FOU.
"It used to be a much more centralized distribution system," Samuelson says, making it easy for contracting specialists to buy products such as Skilcraft brand office supplies made by the blind. However, the closing of General Services Administration depots complicates purchases. And the advent of credit cards and the broadened base of small-purchase buyers have further eroded economies of scale.
On the service side, FOU's challenges parallel those of small businesses. For example, agencies' tying together services into one large purchase, a practice called bundling, limits FOU's ability to get contract awards. One of the government's reasons for bundling is administrative convenience, given dwindling acquisition staffs. Smaller procurement staffs also affect the government's ability to administer FOU's contracts.
Keeping up with today's technology presents another problem. For many years, FOU had a contract with the Marine Corps at Quantico, Va., to convert paper personnel records into microfilm. This approach has been superseded by scanning technology that allows material to be indexed and stored electronically.
By developing business partnerships with other firms, FOU is responding to the bundling challenge. And, by being a flexible, long-term partner, FOU shows agencies that contracting with FOU makes good business sense.
To find out how easy it is to do business with FOU and firms like it, click on www.jwod.gov or www.nish.org. These sites will let you use your purchase card to order products from GSA Advantage or show you the steps to acquire JWOD services. In a memo last year, Federal Procurement Administrator Deidre Lee reminded agencies of their obligation to support the JWOD program. "It's easy to do the right thing," Lee says.
Allan V. Burman, a former Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator, is president of Jefferson Solutions in Washington. Contact him at aburman@govexec.com.
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