Reality At Work

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Last week Purple Orange participated in an ABC television story about people living with disability moving into open employment (i.e. employment with mainstream employers). The story, which focused on some examples of success in mainstream work, was relatively brief, and our appearance more so. 

The ABC's interest in this topic prompted us to update our understanding of the world of employment. To place the ABC story into context, here is our story.

As highlighted in the recent Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) report Disability Expectations, people living with disability in Australia are 50% less likely than non-disabled people to find employment (with Australia ranked 21 of 27 OECD countries), and carry 2.7 times greater risk of poverty than non-disabled people (ranked last of 27 OECD countries).  45% of Australians living with disability are in poverty right now (double the OECD average).

These unsettling statistics suggest that there is much still to be done to support people living with disability to enter proper employment.  Many disability employment agencies around Australia are giving effort to get people into sustainable employment. This work is important because, just like other citizens, people living with disability have inherent value and potential, and therefore have a contribution to make to our economy; this can be made through ordinary workplaces for a fair wage.

While there are plenty of individual successes, the overall results are not encouraging. According to Australian government data to June this year, of the 145,867 people referred to Disability Employment Services only around 15% were making it into sustained employment (we understand this translates to holding on to a job for at least 26 weeks).  This means a massive 85% of people referred to these services (that's over 120,000 people) were not finding sustained employment.  

This must be so disappointing for the people concerned.  Also it must surely discourage employers who are involved. 

There are a number of possible explanations for the disappointing performance. It's not for me to speculate in this blog whether specific agencies are struggling in particular ways.  However, in general across disability support, we know there are a number of key areas where agencies can have issues. If we apply that to employment, these might include:

• Degree of insight to the person's character, strengths, capacity and aspirations;
• Degree of the agency's own imagination of what might be possible;
• Methods of searching for mainstream employment opportunities;
• The nature of the proposition marketed to potential employers;
• Whether the person arrives 'job-ready', or is trained on-the-job with the employer as collaborator;
• Quality of on-the-job capacity-building;
• Quality and extent of post-placement follow-up;
• Concerns about perceived impact on eligibility for disability related pensions.

It is really important that outcomes are improved.  Participation and opportunity are key expectations within the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.  Good outcomes are a clear expectation within the National Disability Standards.  Also, when a person is in waged employment there are the obvious benefits for the person, in terms of having receiving a fair wage for meaningful, valued work.  importantly, there are also critical benefits for society, because the person is contributing to the Common Good, not just in terms of their work contribution, but also in terms of their financial contributions – the person is paying taxes, saving through superannuation, and paying GST when spending disposable income. This represents a genuine return on investment for society, and makes so much more sense than having people living with disability languishing in non-work day services or in nominal-pay sheltered employment mainly alongside other people living with disability.

If designed and implemented effectively, the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the reformed Disability Support Pension arrangements could really help.  The Productivity Commission estimates an extra 320,000 people living with disability could enter employment, and by 2050 produce an additional $31 billion to Australia's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Such predicted gains are impressive and inspiring.  However, their arrival cannot be assumed without a number of other challenges also being met. These include:

• how people living with disability are supported to imagine the possibility of an ordinary valued life, including fare paid work with a mainstream employer;
• how people are supported to access the right information to make an informed choice;
• how people are supported to access material resources that can increase the chances of sustained employment;
• how people are supported to build social capital in support of sustained employment;
• the nature of the relationship between disability employment services and the people they serve, so that the above elements are upheld and advance;
• how mainstream employers are supported to deepen their understanding of the potential of employees living with disability, as contributors to the employers social capital (through workforce diversity) and to the employers profitability (through productivity)
• how disability employment services develop their understanding of the relative costs and effectiveness of agency efforts so that they may evolve those practices that demonstrably help deliver sustained employment and discard those that don't (for example, we hear of an agency achieving a 75% success rate working with people living with significant disability, with job retention at 60% over five years.  If this is true, it is important to understand the practice underlying the success and to replicate it, so that a greater number of people living with disability may benefit).

For the sake of over 120,000 frustrated people, and counting, I hope the two lists of bullets in this blog posting provide a helpful framework for agencies and communities to reflect on current practice and future intent. 

 

2010 Election Promises Part 2

Early Intervention is an important principle, even though I’m not a big fan of the word ‘intervention’ and would prefer something like ‘Early Investment’.  If delivered well it in can assist children living with disability and their families to establish and build critical capacity, get on the ‘front foot’ in life, and move towards a hopeful future.  

To which, on 29 July the Australian Labor Party announced up to $12,000 of early intervention services would be available to each child aged 6 or under with certain types of disability.  The annoucement is here.  This is apparently in addition to new Medicare rebates that are also designed to assist with the costs of early intervention services, creating a total package of $122m over 4 years.

It strikes me that here is a fine opportunity to offer these funds as an Individualised budget, where each eligible family gets their indicative allocation of funds and can then shop around for the services and supports they feel will be most helpful to their circumstances.   Based on the current announcement, it’s not clear to me how the funding actually will be administered, though the ALP mentioned the establishment of a preferred provider panel.  Such panels can be something of a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, they provide a shortcut to service agencies that have been accredited in some way.  On the other hand they limit the horizon, because if a type of service that someone wants is not on the menu of the agencies on the provider panel, then it can’t be bought.  This means that for at least some families we are curtailing the possibility of crafting a truly personalised solution.

Interestingly, the Medicare rebates afford some choice and control to a family who presumably can shop around for the Medicare-registered provider agency that will work best for them.   I assume that there is an accreditation process involved in becoming a Medicare-approved agency and again this might exclude some agencies and the associated choices available to families.

Also on 29 July Labor announced $1 million for projects that support employers to hire and train people living with disability.  You can read the announcement here.  On the face if it this is a step in the right direction.  People living with disability are underrepresented in Australia’s workplaces, and I’m supportive of any initiative that assists more diversity in the workplace where people living with disability are viewed as valued colleagues alongside non-disabled peers.  But in an economy of around 14.5 million Australians of working age (my estimate based on 2007 figures from Australian Bureau of Statistics), we need to think about how far that $1m will actually go.  

Try this back-of-the-envelope analysis.  Let’s assume that 20% of adults of working age live with disability – around 2.9 million. But many of these people will have types of disability that don’t present major barriers to employment.  And some people living with disability are already in employment.  So let’s assume that the adults living with significant disability are those who have registered with their state/territory disability services.  In South Australia I’m guessing this is around 12,000 people.  But some of these people will be employed with mainstream employers.  So I’m going to assume that 2000 of these are outside mainstream employment – I’m not sure if I’m being wildly optimistic here but in any case it will make the back-of-the-envelope maths easier.  So I’m assuming 10,000 people in SA are living with significant disability and currently not in mainstream employment.  Let’s scale this up nationally (SA being around 7% of the national population), which gives us around 147,000 people.  So this is the ‘eligible’ population for assistance into mainstream employment.  And there is $1m available.  So that’s $6.80 each.  

The point here is not to diminish the intention behind the announcement, or to be ungrateful for the $1m, or to understate the potential for the announcement to make at least some mainstream employers think about workplace diversity.  My point is that more funding may be needed to truly make a dent in the issue, and such funding should be part of a broader push to ensure all Australian employers include (and celebrate) people living with disability in their workforce.   

By the way, prior to my moving to Australia I had encountered an organisation based in Chatswood NSW called Employers Making a Difference, who recently changed their name to Australian Network on Disability.  If you are interested in exploring how people living with disability can be supported into open employment opportunities through an "it's good for your business" mindset, they have useful information on their website here. 

Third installment of 2010 Election Promises will be early next week.