Champion rights of persons with disabilities in labour movement

disabled

More than a billion people — 15 per cent — have some form of disability.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Early this month, Kenya joined the world in marking Labour Day. For over two centuries, Labour Day has been celebrated all over the world, honouring the tireless efforts of workers who put in their efforts to make a living for themselves and their dependants.

From the marches for eight-hour working days, to the calls for ‘equal pay for equal work’ across genders, the goal keeps changing with every new generation.

With the advent of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, the clarion call is ‘Leaving No One Behind’. This has been endorsed by many, including the course of promoting job inclusion for persons with disabilities (PWDs), who continue to be overlooked in job allocation opportunities.

This has driven PWDs to the brink of poverty amid their existing low economic fortunes. Cognisant of this gap, the Persons with Disabilities Act of 2003 sets a reservation target of five per cent of jobs in the public and private sectors to be assigned to PWDs. However, this is not the case, yet.

Constitution

According to the Public Service Commission’s status report on Public Service Compliance with the Values and Principles in Articles 10 and 232 of the Constitution for the Year 2018/19, PWDs accounted for only 1.2 per cent of the overall workforce in public service. This is four percentage points below the required threshold. On the positive side though, 13 per cent of newly appointed officers in the 2018/19 financial year under review were PWDs, an impressive and laudable undertaking.

While the picture is quite blurred in the private sector, there are several studies carried out whose findings mirror those in the public sector. But it’s not all gloom. Safaricom, for instance, a giant in the private sector, has PWDs accounting for 2.3 per cent of its workforce, and growing.

This is according to its last annual report, with the company setting the goal of reaching the five per cent threshold by 2025.

In an effort to access job opportunities, persons with disabilities face a myriad of challenges that go back all the way in school. For a majority of families with PWDs, meeting the required financial obligations to keep a child with disability in school is a big challenge because of the expenses they have to deal with brought about by the disability, such as assistive devices and therapy sessions, etc.

For those from poor backgrounds, they end up recording high rates of absenteeism while others end up dropping out, staying at home waiting for help or hawking in the streets. This further feeds into the stereotypes and myths that disabled people can’t do anything for themselves.

With such a background precipitating low literacy levels and insufficient skills, they move into the highly competitive job market to scramble for the few job opportunities with their non-disabled counterparts.

In the job market, they face attitudinal challenges from prospective employers, who doubt their ability to get the job done. As someone once said, ‘the worst thing about a disability is that people see it before they see you.’ They end up getting overlooked during hiring.

Disabled employee

For some employers, taking up a disabled employee also implies incurring some extra costs, such as facilitating a personal assistant or making the environment more accommodative, which could be seen as an expense the business isn’t ready to have.

For others, despite a willingness to hire PWDs, they lack a link to a pool of skilled people, hence they never receive any applications.

For those who penetrate into the workplace, the challenges don’t end there. If they have underlying medical conditions and regular appointments for therapy sessions, getting time off might be difficult where workplace policies are not flexible enough. In the long-term, such situations deprive them of promotion opportunities.

The Central Organisation of Trade Unions Kenya (Cotu), which has over 2.5 million members and 43 affiliate unions is the leader of the labour movement in Kenya. While the union is vocal in advocating for the rights of the ordinary worker, there still lacks a specific loud message on the rights of workers with disabilities. The absence of a strong voice on this matter coming from the champion of workers leaves PWDs waiting for scraps from the labour market table in Kenya.

The National Council for Persons with Disabilities alone cannot promote the welfare of PWDs in the job market. It takes the efforts of impactful stakeholders, which also include Cotu (on behalf of workers) and the Federation of Kenya Employers (on behalf of employers).

A strong voice from these

A strong voice from these two stakeholders could make a big impact.

Several advocacy efforts pushing for disability inclusion at the workplace could arguably be taking long to yield fruit due to a failure to speak the language of business to businesses. And yet, studies continue to show that institutions hiring PWDs is not just a CSR stunt, but it actually makes business-sense. From widening the talent pool, to acquiring loyal employees and increasing diversity in ideas and perspectives, the benefits are good for business.

It is also important to push for incentives to firms that employ PWDs in order to encourage businesses to hire more of them.

Stakeholders in the disability sector should also not only wait for businesses to get skilled PWDs on their own; instead, they should partner with these institutions to develop technological platforms that link employers with prospective PWDs.

In the name of fairness, knowing that disability is not inability, and that we’re all candidates for it, let’s slot PWDs in the country’s labour movement. The current unfortunate status quo indicates they are merely bystanders, an optional discussion. Let’s change this.