Employers 144. Employers, and society in general, are not ready to work with persons with disabilities. According to RA 10524 or the Magna Carta For Persons With Disability, “no person with disability shall be denied access to opportunities for suitable employment. A qualified employee with disability shall be subject to the same terms and conditions of employment and the same compensation, privileges, benefits, fringe benefits, incentives or allowances as a qualified able bodied person.”183 As of August 2017, the Civil Service Commission shared that a total of 7,250 persons with disabilities were employed in government service, 3,973 were men, and 3,277 were women.184 However a CSO participant asserts, “Generally kasi ang ating lipunan ay hindi pa talaga handa na tanggapin na ang mga tao na may kapansanan ay bahagi ng ating lipunan. So may implication noh. May implication ito sa kanilang livelihood employment” [Generally, our society is really not ready to accept persons with disabilities as part of it. So this has an implication. An implication to their livelihood employment]. In other words, the burden of finding a job tends to fall solely on persons with disabilities when the readiness of employers to work with them should also be sought. Discrimination 145. While some persons with disabilities find employment, most still have difficulty getting employed, and diversity, equity, and inclusion issues remain. An employer participant shares that BPO companies they have been working with have started accepting persons with disabilities who could answer the phones and talk to people since their disability does not hamper them from performing such tasks. Persons with visual impairment are competitive as sighted people and are often employed because of their abilities, as explained by a CSO participant, who also shared that they were able to employ a person with visual impairment to a call center that has already employed three persons with disabilities. Then, later on, another BPO company employed five persons with visual impairment. Furthermore, based on the data from their group’s one-week training to capacitate students or graduates with visual impairment, 47% have been employed, mostly by DepEd, followed by BPO, then massage clinics. 146. While it takes as fast as two weeks, on a rare occasion, for a qualified person with visual impairment to get hired, it can also take years for someone with visual impairment who lacks skills to find employment. Moreover, the same CSO participant acknowledges that the employment of persons with disabilities is still limited since the decision to hire an applicant still rests on the employers who may have prejudices, as implied by what one employer participant relates about some companies being 183 An Act Expanding the Positions Reserved for Persons with Disability, Amending the Purpose Republic Act No. 7277, As Amended, Otherwise Known as the Magna Carta for Persons with Disability, Republic Act No. 10524, § 1, (2012) (as amended). 184 Letter from Alicia dela Rosa-Bala, Chairperson of the Civil Service Commission, to Undersecretary Severo S. Catura, Executive Director of the Presidential Human Rights Committee Secretariat (May 28, 2018), available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bmJTv7La_od1syTu-D2BbMKB-B2TdgIs/view (last accessed June 21, 2022). 54