Arkansas Workers with Disabilities

May 15th, 2007 Posted by Amelia

An alliance between the Office of Disability Employment Policy and the Society of Human Resource Managers will provide more jobs Arkansas workers with disabilities.

The alliance is a first between a major human resource professional’s organization and the Office of Disability Employment Policy or ODEP, which was formed in 2001 to help to ensure that people with disabilities were fully integrated into the 21st century workforce. The ODEP is a policy agency in the US Department of Labor.

The recent alliance of the major human resource professionals and the US Dept of Labor will aim to provide more jobs for Arkansas workers with disabilities.

Speaking about the alliance, the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Disability Employment Policy, Roy Gizzard said, “This alliance formalizes the relationship we have had with the SHRM, benefiting SHRM as it serves its membership with the resources ODEP brings to the table and offering ODEP the opportunity for broader contact with human resource professionals.”

The Society of Human Resource Managers was formed in 1948 and since then has become the largest worldwide association that deals with human resource professionals. It has over 205,000 individual members and more that 550 affiliated chapters throughout over 100 countries worldwide. Its aim is to provide for the needs of human resource professionals by providing up to date, essential and comprehensive resources and information.

The alliance between the SHRM and the ODEP will aim to provide resources to people with disabilities. It will do this by concentrating on communication, outreach, training and education. It will supply IT assistance for workers with disabilities. The ODEP reported that even though opportunities for disabled workers have risen in recent year, people with disabilities are still underutilized in today’s labor force.

The partnership that has been formed between the two organizations will, through education, research and access, facilitate the hiring and recruiting of disabled workers.

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Human Resource New Hire Reporting in Arkansas

December 11th, 2006 Posted by Mark

In Arkansas, the change in the federal law in the 1990s also affected the labor law on hiring and reporting new employees as well. So employers in Arkansas, you also have to be up on all of your new hire forms, such as applications, reference check forms, payroll deduction forms, drug testing forms, and anything else that your human resource department might have new hired fill out and sign.

The reason is that the new hire reporting labor law in the state requires employers to provide a good bit of information on their new hires. You have to have handy such information as your federal employer identification number, or FEIN—which you don’t need to get from your new employees, obviously.

But you also need to know the employee’s social security number, their full name (first, middle and last), along with the first date of their hire, their date of birth, and their official state of hire. That last bit of information is important if you’re operating a multistate company and plan to have the employee working in more than one office in more than one state.

In Arkansas, the labor law for new hire reporting has entered the 21st century, allowing employers to file some of this information on new hires by the Internet, or by other electronic reporting methods such as faxes. Otherwise, employers can go the surefire old way of mailing in the new hire report to the state.

However you report your new hires, the labor law in Arkansas follows the basic federal guidelines and requires the info to be sent in no later than 20 days after the hiring. As with some other states, Arkansas offers a slightly different time frame if you do it electronically. Then, you can report your new hires in batches, twice a month, with no more than 16 days between the batches.

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