November 2003 - Disability and diversity

Customers visiting Volkswagen's Wolfsburg plant service workshop are met by Holger Janz, the receptionist. Sometimes, if they do not say anything and have not looked at the sign on his counter, they may wonder why he has not acknowledged them. It is because Mr Janz is blind; the sign asks people to talk directly to him so that he knows they are there.

Mr Janz was recruited for the job because Volkswagen has a policy of integrating people with disabilities into its workforce and its management believed he could do the work as well as anyone else. He must be doing a good job, since customer satisfaction has gone up since he came to the counter.

This should not be surprising. People with disabilities are under-represented in workforces. This means there are thousands of talented people waiting for the opportunity to prove themselves. Those employers that work through the issues involved with disability are those that will be best placed to capitalise on this section of the workforce.

Volkswagen is one of several blue-chip companies that have lent support to the European Year of People with Disabilities, a European Union initiative promoted by the European Disability Forum to elevate disability on the social and political agenda. Its deliberately inclusive slogan says: "Nothing about us without us."

It is not before time. Disability does not tend to feature highly on diversity agendas. While most minorities have a legitimate reason to enjoy equal rights and representation in the workplace, disability rarely seems to be at the forefront of managerial thinking.

A conference in Brussels last week attempted to redress this imbalance, highlighting the kind of work that can be achieved if employers and designers work alongside those who experience disabilities. German companies have a legal obligation to allocate 5 per cent of their jobs to people who have some kind of serious disability but Volkswagen has gone beyond this: 6.4 per cent of its employees are disabled.

It has done this by committing itself to finding alternative work for people who are no longer able to do certain jobs. Arne Meiswinkel, VW's head of international labour relations, says this was achieved by concentrating on an employee's abilities. One man who had to give up his production line job owing to back problems was re-allocated to information technology work when he revealed that computing was a hobby.

Some employers, such as the BBC, have been going out of their way to increase opportunities for disabled job candidates. The BBC runs a scheme offering 16-week placements to about 40 disabled people a year, enabling them to work in support areas and programme-making. More than half these people are still working for the corporation 18 months later, says Wendy Harpe, senior manager of the BBC's diversity unit.

But such initiatives are piecemeal. Even some of the most enlightened employers still get things wrong. BBC television producers learnt a hard lesson three years ago when they left no access for the wheelchair of Tanni Grey-Thompson, the athlete, to collect her award at its flagship Sports Personality of the Year event. "You learn from these mistakes," says Ms Harpe.

Susan Scott-Parker, chief executive of the Employers' Forum on Disability in the UK believes that attitudes to disability need to change, particularly among business leaders and politicians.

"The cabinet never issues a press release saying how marvellous, we have ... ministers with disabilities, but it never misses the opportunity to highlight women ministers," she says.

David Blunkett, the home secretary, describes his blindness as an "inconvenience" rather than a disability. Gordon Brown, the chancellor, is blind in one eye and Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, is deaf in one ear. None of these disabilities, not even Mr Blunkett's blindness, prevents these ministers from doing their jobs. But that is the point.

It also illustrates the difficulties in defining disability. There is no universally agreed definition of disability in the EU although member states will need to have discrimination laws covering disability by the end of 2006. The definition of a disabled person in the UK's Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 is "anyone with a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect upon the person's ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities".

The UK Act was extended last month to include all employers. Previously it had applied only to those with more than 15 employees. This means that all UK employers will need to think more carefully about their approach to disabled job candidates and working arrangements for disabled employees. Manpower, the agency for temporary employment, has produced some useful employment and recruitment guidelines based on research it undertook for a report, "People With Disabilities"*, published this year.

Some of the companies most active in promoting awareness of disability issues have been big agencies for temporary employment, such as Manpower, Adecco and Blue Arrow. Blue Arrow has been working with the British-based charity Motability. Adecco, meanwhile, committed itself to placing at least 7,000 people with disabilities in the EU labour market in 2003, a figure it surpassed within nine months.

It is encouraging to find companies tackling disability head on but there is still a lot to be done in transforming attitudes, not only in understanding the needs of disabled people but also in improving technology to make working life more feasible.

We mastered the technology needed to put man on the moon within 10 years of President John F. Kennedy's laying down the challenge. But it has taken far longer to get technology that can help blind people to find their way to the supermarket. Today this technology exists in a tool called Trekker, a global positioning satellite (GPS) device for the blind, marketed by VisuAide. It is a sign of society's priorities that GPS navigation systems, developed by the military, had some of their first commercial applications in cars.

In the meantime, London Underground has a target to increase the number of stations with step-free access (currently 29 out of 253 stations) to more than 100 by 2020. Progress may seem slow but at least it is going in the right direction. The provision of disabled access to public transport is just taking a little bit longer than space programmes.

*The reports can be downloaded from: www.csreurope.org/aboutus/ csranddisability_page379.aspx

Download as a pdf file