Work and disability: “the right person in the right place” applies to everyone.

Work is one of the most significant activities in people’s lives, playing a crucial role not only economically—providing independence—but also socially, as it helps individuals identify with their roles and find their place in society. This holds true whether one is working in an administrative function in public administration or in a professional role within a private company. Work is a topic of primary importance in general, and even more so when it comes to disability. Therefore, the aspects of economic independence and social identification must be protected in the context of disability. Reports and research indicate that our society is still not fully prepared for the complete inclusion of workers with disabilities. For this reason, essential regulatory measures are necessary to initiate and, hopefully, achieve successful work integration for individuals with disabilities.   

Work and Disability: A European Perspective

In 2000, the European Union enacted the Employment Equality Directive, urging member states to ensure equal treatment in the workplace regardless of ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion, belief, or disability. Despite this, the latest data (2022) shows a significant employment gap: 76.06% of people in the EU are employed, compared to 51.03% of those with disabilities. This highlights the long road ahead for true workplace inclusion.

Let’s see some examples: in Italy, law 68/99 on the targeted placement of people with disabilities provides for the hiring of people with a recognized disability equal to or greater than 46% in proportion to the number of employees, up to a maximum of 15% of the total workers. The rule obviously has countless facets and the political work of the last years of the category associations is to adapt the methods of this rule to the needs of the labor market, increasingly fluid, mobile and in search of specific skills. This reasoning is also applied in countries close to Italy: France, Spain and Germany. Another method, used especially in Nordic countries, provides for an ‘umbrella’ law that identifies the need for equality in all areas of people’s lives, including work, and therefore support is provided for the person with disabilities in search of work, starting from the assumption that this must not be discriminated against. Another method, which can coexist with those described above, provides for the entrustment by companies of the hiring of people with disabilities by third-party companies or social cooperatives that will hire people with disabilities in place of the company, if it shows that it does not have the opportunity to hire them at its own spaces. This solution is particularly advantageous for people with a cognitive or psychic disability and is particularly popular in the Latin countries of our Continent

Work and disability: what are the real problems?

Despite the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities being ratified by over 170 countries worldwide, the issue of placement of people with disabilities remains a topic of discussion and constantly asks to be debated and adapted. Even people with disabilities who actually find employment have rather low job satisfaction rates and wages are on average lower, so much so that EU member states continue to provide accompanying allowances for the satisfaction of primary needs, this because the salary is not enough. So what are the factors that influence such a diversified landscape between workers with and without disabilities?

1. Accessibility: evidently one of the themes that is less often correlated with the work difficulties of people with disabilities. However, one cannot imagine a satisfying or complete work activity if the tools, the roads that lead to work and the technologies used to carry out the task are not accessible. The solutions are there, but they are not taken into consideration in the design phase of physical places and virtual spaces. There are experts in this sector who can support organizations in these delicate steps.
2. Little culture of disability in entities and organizations: for a long time the themes of disability have been relegated to the world of volunteering and social solidarity. Although these sectors continue to represent the backbone in the world of disability, we must accept a paradigm shift that provides that even people with disabilities are considered workers like everyone else and therefore taken into consideration for designs and corporate policies.
3. Prejudice: perhaps the main problem for the placement of people with disabilities. Due to the pietistic narrative spread by media, press films and more, people with disabilities are seen as fragile individuals, at most in need of help. This image is very far from the vision of the smart and performing young person that the world of work wants for companies. The most incredible thing is that even people with disabilities can be motivated and smart, indeed, accustomed to a world that does not consider them, when they start a job it is highly likely that they are highly motivated, precisely because they want, most of the times, to break down this prejudice.
4. Access to training: very close to the first point of this list, even access to training has to do with the theme of accessibility. Inclusion in the field of training is still a crucial issue, often a springboard to be able to enter the company of your dreams or to cover the role you have always wanted. Even in the design of courses, training materials, choice of training places (physical or online) accessibility should be the pivot on which to rotate the training design.

Finally

In the European Union, people are protected in terms of purchasing power and the satisfaction of primary needs. We can affirm this because we can count on policies aimed at economically supporting people with disabilities, but we identify a significant imbalance between intentions and what is actually done. On paper, companies want to be inclusive, they are even legally obliged to hire collaborators with disabilities, but the quality of the match between the company and the worker is still poor, due to the stigma attached to these workers and an approach to accessibility that is still limping and immature. The writer believes that increasing awareness on these issues in a very practical way, relying on industry experts, as is done for any other business issue, are the keys to ensuring a job inclusion that is not just that required by the legislator, but a quality inclusion, that meets the needs of companies and workers, in short, the classic ‘right worker in the right place’.