The Ten Demandments

How to improve employment services for people with disability

Martin Wren

• Publisher: Employment First
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780994429377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droit du travail et de l'emploi

The Ten Demandments throws down the challenge to all people associated withemployment for people with a disability to lift our game. Currently, job seekers with adisability are not being well served by structures, processes, employment services oremployers, resulting in what psychologist and disability activist Wolfy Wolfensbergerreferred to as 'the wound of a wasted life'.

As CEO of one of the most effective disability employment services in Australia, thejob seekers I come across are keen and able to work. They just need to developworkplace skills, confidence and some guidance in the right vocational direction. Theright to work is a basic human right that is largely denied this huge section of theworld's population. The Ten Demandments outlines ten main steps to take for theindustry, governments, individuals and their carers to ensure improved quality ofservice. The demandments aspect is not tongue in cheek. We must demand better ofour governments, ourselves and each other.

Currently a lot of people are making a lot of money from the behind the façade ofDisability Employment Services. I should know! Working in a disability employmentservice means I am tempted by the same subsidies, the same motivations and the samesolutions as the rest of the industry. No one has asked these ten questions asdirectly or as clearly as I do in this book, or from inside the industry.

Readers from within the industry will want to cringe away from and deny the truthsrevealed within The Ten Demandments. Readers from outside the industry will raisetheir arms in shame. And they're right to do so. People's lives are at stake. Through lack of realistic employmentoptions, we are at risk of continuing to waste people with disability's lives.

The Ten Demandments is a clear, accessible, ten-step guide challenging readers toalter their attitude and approach to disability employment services, be they policymakers, educators, employers, carers or the workers themselves. Often attitudinal change is the hardest part.

With a foreword by U.S. author and disability activist Dale DiLeo and anendorsement from Vivienne Riches from the University of Sydney’s Centre ofDisability Studies, this resource will enable even an uninitiated person to identify thesupports essential for successful transition from welfare recipient to proud employee.

Chapter 1: Zero Exclusion

Where are all our older people with a disability?

I’m still looking for them. Statistics show⁷ that people from disadvantaged and/or marginalised groups have lower life spans – not because they are inherently less healthy but through poverty and isolation they are more likely to be denied access to high quality (or in some cases any) health care⁸. Kept apart from mainstream society, members of disadvantaged groups fare badly compared to their mainstream peers⁹.

Health is not the only area in which people with a disability miss out. Higher levels of socio-economic disadvantage, social isolation and lower levels of formal education all contribute to compound the exclusion of people with a disability from full participation.

According to psychologist Dr Wolf Wolfensberger¹⁰, members of marginalised groups endure psychological wounds¹¹ through relegation to low status and rejection¹², perhaps by family, neighbours, community, society and service workers. Few groups are as marginalised as people with profound disability. Wolfensberger believed these wounds, viewed collectively, would lead to premature death.

Currently, disability support systems fail to properly assist people with high support needs to gain and maintain employment, even though this is what legislation in many countries is designed to do. In Australia, legislation created a framework specifically designed to support the employment of people who have ongoing support needs. The authors of the Disability Services Act 1986 understood that each group required a different level of support in all areas of life, including finding and maintaining employment. To keep delivery simple, two groups were outlined:

• Group one included individuals who would need ongoing support for their working lives.
• Group two included individuals who would require support to enter the workforce and learn the ropes, but would become independent at some stage in the future.

In relation to employment it’s easy to service the most able in society. Generally, individuals without the handicap of disability are able to express their interests, needs and goals more easily. The most able approach new experiences more readily. Their self-efficacy is higher. On the other hand, people with more profound disabilities require significant support to enter employment. In practice this support ranges from matching their goals and aspirations to available opportunities, all the way through to personalised and ongoing post-placement support to ensure the maintenance of competence in the role.

Almost 30 years after this Act came into effect, employment service providers are significantly pressured by their funding body to get results. ‘Performance’ is supposed to move upward annually and cut-throat competition exists to ensure organisational survival.

There is no doubt that in some markets this is an effective means of driving efficiency and effectiveness. But if the goal of disability employment programs is to support the most disadvantaged to achieve the maximum level of independence, then the model doesn’t work.

In fact the creation of a ruthlessly enforced drive for numbers has created a system that fails to properly serve the interests of people with disability. In the disability employment sector, competition actually leads to a practice known as ‘gaming’. Gaming refers to disability employment services exploiting gaps in contracts for the purpose of misleading the funding body into thinking that real changes are happening and expected quotas are fulfilled.

Gaming is denied by funding bodies worldwide, yet widely acknowledged by the disability employment services industry. It occurs because the present system requires and rewards increasing numbers of people placed into jobs. If you placed 10 people into work last year then this year you must aim for 11. So it goes, no matter the number of hours’ preparation, training and support required for one person to be placed into work that is appropriate for them. When the survival of the organisation is in constant threat, time spent with job seekers drops.

Because time is money, pressure is created that leads to better servicing for the most able and it’s too bad if you have more complex needs. In turn, placing job seekers with lower support needs into work reduces the demand for higher skilled employment service staff, lowers the costs of placing job seekers into work and reduces the need for extensive post-placement support. Selecting easy-to-place job seekers in front of job seekers with more significant support needs forms part of the ‘creaming’ process. This practice keeps disability employment services in business because it maintains their job-placement numbers. The sector manipulates the environment in two ways:

1. Easily places people with a low level of disability into eight-hour-a-week jobs¹³, even though they’re capable of working more hours in a more challenging environment.
2. Persuades the job seeker that this eight-hour-a-week job will be a foot in the door (without ever intending to improve the worker’s hours, conditions or position). The organisation is remunerated at the same level, no matter how many hours the job seeker works.

We have allowed a system where the harder-to-place job seekers are relegated to sheltered workshops, while the easier-to-place workers are selected to boost numbers. The result? People with higher levels of disability are excluded. Again.

I believe that employment service providers have an obligation to ensure that they offer an inclusive model of service delivery that contains an explicit statement to accept any person wishing to gain employment, regardless of the level of barrier that person may face. We simply cannot go around excluding more challenging job seekers. If we do, where do those people go?

A question needs to be asked in relation to motive – are we here to help the most disadvantaged people or here to help ourselves? The entry of ‘for-profit’ providers should be ringing powerful alarm bells for government and the general public.

Why so?

By definition, ‘for-profit’ providers expect to achieve a financial surplus from their efforts and the greater that surplus the higher the level of shareholder satisfaction. But generally people with disabilities are not the major shareholders. Instead, the level of service delivered to them is dependent upon the profitability of those actions taken on their behalf – if there’s no money in it for the provider then there will be no actions taken.

As well, presently service users can only register with a single provider. That provider is unlikely to explain to the harder-to-place job seeker that their presence at the agency is unprofitable; instead, there is a real risk of those job seekers languishing at the end of a waiting list. Ignorant of the potential pitfalls and without informed support, job seekers lose the opportunity to participate in the life-defining role of worker.

How can service providers ensure that those job seekers who come to them are not disadvantaged? Practice zero exclusion. Adopting a zero exclusion policy means it doesn’t matter how the job seeker presents, if they want a job the service provider will make every possible effort to find them a job.

This is the challenge of working in disability employment. Working with people who have more significant barriers to employment is a challenge to a staff member’s initiative and problem-solving skills and to the organisation that employs them. The financial gain for placing a person with low-support needs and one with high-support needs into work is the same, even though the high-support job seeker requires more time, ingenuity and support. Competition with for-profit providers puts the industry in a terrible bind.

Choosing the correct environment is vital in order to find suitable and sustainable employment for people with a disability. A whole range of factors interrelate and contribute towards success. Among the most important is the need for the job seeker to fit into the culture of their employer.

Time and again I see the importance of finding a good fit when I read job-seeker feedback¹⁴. A real-world example: ‘Pablo is the most wonderful, hard-working young fellow. It’s been a privilege to have him here. Nothing is too much trouble. He’s here before we open and stays until we close’. From another panel beater in the same suburb: ‘Pablo has two left feet; he’s clumsy, silly and lazy. He’s not suited for this trade’. One potential employer was a major dealership; the other was a small family smash repairer. The two firms were so close they shared a wall. One suited Pablo well, the other didn’t.

Staff within my organisation work closely with our job seekers so that they can fit into as many settings as possible. To do this, they work on much broader skills than those defined as work skills, such as saying good morning, eye contact, and the right weight of a handshake. These workplace social skills are often taken for granted; however, many of our clients lack practice due to social isolation and a lack of relationships. We incorporate these skills into our training, so that the person fits in, because once they fit in, they’re more likely to keep their job.

Here’s a case in point. Years ago a young woman called Stephanie came to NOVA asking for a job. She said, ‘I’m dying and, before I die, I want a job like every other girl’. She had Hurler’s syndrome and, at 20 years of age, had lived well beyond her life expectancy. By the time she came to us she was using a wheelchair and had limited dexterity, yet she had a bubbly personality and there was nothing she wouldn’t try. We needed a workplace that would adapt to her limitations while at the same time welcome her as a valuable part of the team.

Fortunately we found such a workplace – makers of mechanical scales to be used in schools. There was just one challenge. We had to find a tool she could use to do her job. I went to the local hardware store and asked if they had anything fit for the purpose. We tried several tools, each one getting a little closer. After about half an hour, with every staff member contributing to a solution, the team at the hardware store had modified exactly the right screwdriver for Stephanie to use.

Stephanie worked diligently for over 12 months before she passed away. In that time she had such a profound effect on her workplace that her co-workers changed the way they thought of people with a disability. Despite extreme physical challenges, her attitude towards others was inspirational and contagious.

You can’t give up on people.

The solution is to service job seekers on a first in, first served basis, with no excuse for failing to place them into a job that suits their aspiration and ability. This would keep the bastards honest¹⁵. Formal policies to ensure all job seekers are equally supported and more assistance is given to those with greatest need would mean that no matter how difficult the person who came in third appears to be, they would be placed into employment third.

To achieve this outcome requires the team and its resources to gather around that person to ensure their job-seeking interests, skills and aspirations are matched to the best job available. The individual is supported in the workplace. The workplace and its staff are educated and supported. These efforts are maintained because the goal of the placement is long-term, meaningful work for as many hours as the person aspires to work.

For the first 10 years after the passing of the Disability Services Act, Australia had an innovative disability employment program that did not discriminate on the basis of perceived need. Since that time it seems that policy makers and program managers have conspired to drive talent from the industry, reduce specialisation and encumber the whole program with job seekers who may well be work resistant, but whose level of ability would once have been not sufficiently challenging for a disability employment service.

Long term, the competitive environment that pushed providers toward helping the most able and the introduction of less challenging persons into the system threatens the viability and credibility of the whole program. These changes may not have been deliberate, but they reek of decisions by people with no personal experience of the needs of people with a disability and no intention of finding out about their enormous capacity to contribute to the workplace.

In Australia disability employment services hit an all-time low following the business reallocation of 2013. A total of 46 long-term, quality service providers were closed. One of my organisation’s direct competitors had about 480 people registered. They’d been finding good jobs for people, particularly young people, for 20 years. When it closed, the job seekers were handed to an organisation whose experience consisted of running a sheltered workshop and whose previous experience in providing open employment was limited to 40 people. The CEO called me, distraught. Not for herself – for those in her care. She knew that her 480 job seekers’ new employment service did not have the experience or the interest or the mandate to continue to support those job seekers through their various stages of employment, including post-placement support.

Subsequently many of the workers successfully placed into work lost their jobs, resulting from a combination of inexperience on the part of the service provider and fractured relationships between the worker, new service and employer. Remember, neither the person with a disability nor their employer was consulted about the changes.

Particularly galling was that, three years later, the new ‘you beaut’ provider had not achieved anywhere near the departing service’s level of outcomes and, at the time of writing, was about to lose the business they took!

In this environment there is a very real risk that disability employment services will end up serving the worried well, not those with a psychosis; people with a sore foot, not amputees. These policies not only neglect people with significant barriers to employment, they force abandonment of ‘hard’ cases. Abandonment is the real crime here.

As far as employment is concerned there is nothing that can’t be achieved by a group of skilled people determined to succeed. Absolutely nothing. I guarantee it. Tak...