People with severe disabilities are often well educated, but find it more difficult to find work. Also because companies don’t know how inclusion can succeed. How can this be changed?
If Eva Lenz wants to see her boss on the floor above her desk at reception, she has to take a detour across the courtyard. She cannot climb the narrow stairs with a wheelchair or walking frame. So she drives her wheelchair to the entrance of the neighboring building, which has an elevator, and climbs four more steps on the upper floor using a stair lift.
The solution is not perfect, admits company boss Jürgen Reitenspies. But that doesn’t seem to bother Eva Lenz. In a good mood, she makes her way to the meeting room on the executive floor. “The colleagues are nice. The work is fun,” she says and explains how the employment contract came about.
Severe disability was not an obstacle
Right from the start, she didn’t have the feeling that her severe disability could be an obstacle – even though her employer, the paint and varnish manufacturer ReiColor in Altdorf near Nuremberg, had to install a stair lift and hold-open systems for the fire doors.
“It wasn’t a big decision-making issue for us,” says Reitenspies. An employee who sits in a wheelchair has been working in production for 20 years. As a family business with almost 50 employees, he also sees a social responsibility. This means that the chemical company is one of the minority of companies in Germany that meet the legal quota for jobs for people with severe disabilities.
A quarter do not employ people with severe disabilities
“25 percent of employers who actually have to employ severely disabled people do not employ them,” says Christoph Beyer, chairman of the Federal Working Group of Integration Offices. Half of the companies obliged to do so employ people with severe disabilities, but do not meet the prescribed quota – and these numbers have been constant for years, he says.
According to the Federal Employment Agency, almost 173,800 people with a severe disability were unemployed in February – almost 7,300 more than a year earlier. The Federal Agency will present current figures on the labor market this Thursday. Since April last year, experts from Aktion Mensch and the Handelsblatt Research Institute have been observing that the economic downturn is worsening the chances of people with disabilities on the job market.
Poorer opportunities despite a shortage of skilled workers
“In our opinion, these people are not taken into consideration, even though they are well trained,” says Christina Marx from Aktion Mensch. This means that, despite the shortage of skilled workers, companies are not only foregoing potentially capable employees, but are also paying extra: companies that do not employ or employ too few people with severe disabilities have to pay a compensatory levy to the integration offices. At the beginning of this year, this was increased for companies that do not fill any of the mandatory positions.
The obligation to employ severely disabled people applies gradually to companies with more than 20 employees. Companies with more than 60 employees must make five percent of their jobs available to severely disabled people. If they don’t, they have to pay the levy, which previously ranged between 140 and 360 euros per unoccupied severely disabled job per month and can now be up to 720 euros.
According to Beyer, we will first be able to tell what effect this will have next spring. In his experience, hiring people with severe disabilities is usually not about money. So why could employers be hesitant?
Fear of doing something wrong
“Reservations are the biggest obstacles,” explains Marx. These included fears such as that people with disabilities would be less productive or sick more often, but also uncertainties about how one should deal with the disability in personal contact or that one could do something wrong. “But you can only dismantle that if you meet these people,” says Marx.
“My boss always says I’m doing pioneering work,” says Franziska Sgoff. The 27-year-old has been blind since birth. She has been working at Microsoft in Munich since 2021 and advises business customers on how digital technologies can ensure greater accessibility. “I have the feeling that there is definitely a lot of interest in the topic. I also believe that many companies want to hire people with disabilities, but sometimes don’t know how.”
Contact points should be pilots
An important lever in this regard should be the single contact points for employers, which were set up at the integration offices in 2022. These are intended to support companies that employ people with severe disabilities, for example by providing support or helping with applications. “They coordinate the individual building blocks,” explains Beyer. And there seems to be a lot of interest in this: “Employer inquiries are pleasingly high,” says Beyer. According to him, the first meaningful data on this will probably be available in the summer.
Beyer does not believe that the increased compensation levy and the contact points will encourage all companies to employ people with disabilities. “That would be unrealistic.” But perhaps this will give more people like Eva Lenz or Franziska Sgoff an opportunity to prove themselves. For both young women, an internship led to permanent employment; for both, this came about on their own initiative. “I was able to show what I could do,” says Sgoff. Other people with disabilities could also have a chance like this, she says.
Source: Stern
