South Africa D/@bility
By William Rowland
It began with a debate and a lot of uncertainty. In the past the employment of disabled persons had depended on persuasion and goodwill. Now it was proposed to launch an employment agency that would charge for its services. The idea that employers, accustomed to a cheap source of labour from NGOs, would be lining up to recruit disabled workers at commercial rates seemed far-fetched, not to say absurd. Was it wishful thinking or an idea whose time had come?
DEC - an investment trust within the disability sector - had recently acquired a 5% stake in Adcorp Holdings, a public company providing an extensive range of training and employment services. Many of its specialist brands were household names in South Africa - Quest, Premier, Capacity, Career Junction, Equal Access, The Oval Office, Boston Business College, and others. It would make sense to add to the list a company focussing on disability, that could exploit this enormous network - that was the view of Adcorp Executive Director Alec Rubenstein. DEC could come in as an equal partner and Adcorp would put up the venture capital.
A factor weighing in our favour was the employment equity legislation that had newly come into force. The disability rights movement had lobbied long and hard for the inclusion of certain provisions and we had largely had our way. The public sector would be required to achieve a 2% level of employment of disabled persons by 2005, while bigger employers would have to register employment equity and skills development plans setting numerical targets in terms of race, gender, and disability. A company offering disability solutions and operated by us ourselves would have huge credibility and would surely be sought after by government departments, para-statals and major corporations.
Risks and skepticism
But it did represent a risk. Such a thing had never been done before, anywhere, as far as we were aware. Our business partner stood to lose money; we stood to lose trust. To have our own consultancy seemed like the logical next step for the disability movement, but we remained sceptical.
It was at this point that Adcorp asked us to see Lorna Fick. Lorna, at the time, a trained human resources executive in the IT industry, was surprised to receive a phone call from Adcorp, and even more surprised to hear our proposition. She had the knowledge and the passion, that was clear, but would she have the resilience to overcome the prejudice and obstacles we were anticipating? Today, two years on, we know the answer, but only while interviewing Lorna for this piece did I discover the true source of her resolve.
"I have a sister with Down's Syndrome. I've got a father who's a labour lawyer. He got shot and lost his mobility and, subsequently, he lost his position and was pensioned off early. And I have got an uncle who's deaf and lived with us during my high school years. So I'd seen a lot of different disabilities and people looking for jobs.
"As a lawyer my dad employed, without anyone telling him to do so, a person with an intellectual disability. And obviously that came from having a daughter with Down's Syndrome. So I had a lot to think about and chew on."
And so Lorna was appointed as CEO of D/@bility Resource Solutions. And having made the commitment, we deployed two of our most capable leaders to the board of directors - Mike du Toit, CEO of DEC and former secretary general of DPSA, and Patrick Molala, a political prisoner in the struggle years and now Director of Development at the SANCB.
The name D/@bility (pronounced Dee-ability) was carefully chosen, but probably requires some explanation:
D = DEC (Disability Employment Concerns Trust);
@ = Adcorp;
/ = the 50/50 joint venture between DEC and Adcorp; and
bility = what it is all about.
Looking back over 20 months
Let us now examine the track record of D/@bility after 20 months of operation. How are we doing and what are the achievements?
The first step was to position D/@bility as a niche company within the Adcorp group. This meant that the management at some three dozen other companies had to recognise the specialist role of D/@bility and channel their disability business to Lorna and her colleagues. Even more important, they had to persuade their major clients to take their disability equity commitments more seriously.
But D/@bility could not survive on the goodwill of its partner companies alone. It has to take the direct route as well and pitch for business in its own right. To secure actual orders and contracts, and sustainable results, a much broader process needs to be set in motion, as Lorna explains.
"Typically, we start the process by approaching a client's senior transformation executive. That could be the human resources director, or the financial director, or even the director dealing with procurement. We explain to that person that disability should be treated with the exact same drive and commitment as the entire affirmative action programme concerning previously disadvantaged individuals. Normally people just think 'race', and 'gender', and disability just gets left out.
"Then you need them to embrace the idea that this is something of strategic value. Because if you do not align yourself and you do not become an employer who is progressive and inclusive you will be at risk, not only of losing business, but also of incurring penalties as you go along. So you have to let them see the business sense of making this part of affirmative action policy.
"From there on we outline to them the various policies it impacts. Where do they need to put focus? Is their affirmative action policy a management document only? How informed are the human resources manager, and the line managers? Do they understand the strategic focus of all of this? "and once the client understands the concept and buys in to it, the impetus then starts coming from the client. Let's drive this! Lets make this happen! And the clients start lining up: Lets get our HR people trained! Lets get our transformation committee trained!"
Lorna and her team also address issues of productivity, of competitiveness, of behaviour around disability, making use of case studies to support their arguments. The success of this whole approach is perhaps best illustrated by the list of companies and institutions that have accorded preferred supplier status to D/@bility - IBM, Nike, Liberty Life (insurance), Netcare (health services), Rand Merchant Bank, Development Bank of South Africa, Rand Water Board, MTN (cellphone network operator), and Ntsika (an enterprise of the Department of Trade and Industries promoting small business). The list also includes Statistics South Africa and Telkom, via Quest, within the Adcorp Group.
Idea of how to utilize contract work or "temping"
Because of the pressure to employ equitable numbers of African, Coloured, and Indian staff, plus high percentages of women, employers often feel they have enough to cope with. Lorna thinks it best to accept this position and to try and work around it. This is where the idea of contract work (or temping) comes in handy. For employers it means not having to commit to a headcount that may prove unaffordable later and time to iron out problems. For the disabled employee it means the learning of new skills and the gaining of experience and, sometimes, the chance to try out a job that might not have been considered otherwise. Several of these temporary appointments are being converted to permanent placements.
Companies in transformation can be extremely unhappy places, with management acting under duress, blue collar workers feeling put upon, and women off to one side. People just stop caring and "me, myself, and I" becomes the attitude, says Lorna. Enter someone with a disability and the situation surely gets worse? "Not so," claims Lorna, siting examples to show the opposite. Helping a physically disabled colleague fetch the first cup of coffee in the morning does something for people, an effect Lorna calls "a bonding fluid". The placement of a deaf cashier in a supermarket, far from causing the expected negative behaviour, drew the warmest of compliments from co-workers and clients alike.
While this is encouraging, such responses cannot be relied on to sustain the project. The D/@bility team realises this full well, and that success ultimately depends on quality of support. One of D/@bility's partnering agencies is Capacity, which recruits blue collar workers for major corporations, say, 200 placements at a time. The suggestion to include 2% of disabled workers is then offered as part of the service to the employer and the role of D/@bility is to manage the placements on-site and intensively train line managers, as is being done at a large paper manufacturer.
Sometimes the role of D@bility is purely that of training and consultancy. When Statistics South Africa hired 70 employees with disabilities all over the country, under sponsorship of the Department of Labour, a whole network of support had to be activated, including the Transport Users Group, Access College to deal with computer training, work hardening, and stress management, a specialist company to provide transformation and integration workshops, with D/@bility itself advising on diversity management.
Ye Olde Learning Curve
Providing technology solutions is a further challenge, and it comes with a steep learning curve. When AST, an international software company, employed a blind operative in its call centre to answer technical queries, D/@bility was told that there were three programmes to be adapted to the access software. Deena Moodley, the blind computer whizz contracted in to do the scripting, found that there were actually ten. And programming problems were not the only ones he had to cope with: he discovered that the operator - let's call him Jack - was forgetting his key strokes, simply because he was not writing them down; that, instead of raising all existing problems at once, Jack was raising them one by one, a visit at a time; and, worst of all, after completing some complex reprogramming on a substitute computer - Deena being unaware of the switch - the computer was removed and all work lost. However, after nearly cancelling the order, AST has now decided to up the number of blind operatives to five. With some 86,000 new jobs in South African call centres each year, D@bility cannot afford to falter and, hopefully, solutions will be repeatable with increasing frequency.
The D/@bility data base tells a story of its own. With 1700 names it is a very modest resource, given the disability population of several millions. Of these 1700 work-seekers, perhaps 40% have some experience to offer, or a tertiary qualification. The rest are what Lorna calls "people with potential"; but in an economy where 40% of people are unemployed, and the unemployment rate of disabled persons is close to 90%, finding employment for the unqualified and inexperienced is more than a daunting task.
Systemic change, and the building of a new culture around disability, have to be part of the long term solution. Social pensions are a huge disincentive to employment, because to find a job is to lose your grant, immediately. The welfare model of service provision by NGOs has fostered attitudes of dependency, while the family, too, can be a place of over protection. A mother, father, or spouse may pretend to welcome a job offer, but actually refuse to let go, or raise unrealistic expectations - "my son has a degree; why can't he be a director?" (the wish to start at the top.)
Seeing things in a new way ... doing things differently ... that is the message of D/@bility. The business model has the Johannesburg office of D/@bility serving as the hub for some fifteen network points throughout the country, comprising satellite offices, allied agencies, and even individual employment consultants. Regular training courses of commerce and industry will have reserved via by D/@bility, and government will be lobbied relentlessly for a technology fund. Above all, the disability rights movement must adopt a socioeconomic agenda involving every employed and unemployed disabled person as an activist for self-determined employment.
Meanwhile, the team of five at D/@bility is a task group already in action - one of them partially sighted, two of them with neurological problems, one the daughter and sister of disabled persons, and another a sign language interpreter. Good luck to you, Lorna, Michelle, Ronelle, Gillian, and Garth. Together we are a force that no power in the world can resist!
Abbreviations used in this article:
DPSA = Disabled People South Africa
SANCB = South African National Council for the Blind
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