Norway: progressing towards an inclusive working life
By Tone Mork, Director, Norwegian National Insurance Administration
Background and intentions
Norway wants to develop a working life which provides room for all - not only those who can always give themselves at least 100% to the labour market. You should be allowed to be ill, you should be allowed to be old and you should be allowed to be disabled. An inclusive working life will be a working life which has room for everyone who wants to work and who can work - a working life which has room for people with temporary or permanent functional impairments and for older workers.
However, this has not been the way things have developed until now. There have been major problems in recent years because an increasing number of people are becoming ill and are subsequently leaving working life and going into passive retirement. The problem is also demonstrated by the fact that an awful lot of disabled people have problems finding jobs, in spite of the fact that levels of education among disabled persons have increased substantially in recent years.
Developments in working life in Norway have been characterised by a tight labour market with 280,000 people who are excluded from the labour market because of disability or early retirement. Absence due to sickness has been increasing and in the fourth quarter of 2001 absence due to sickness stood at 6.6%. This means that at any time around 500,000 of the country's 4.5 million citizens are not working. In 2001 the State paid out NOK 23.7 billion in daily cash sickness benefit. This is very high seen against the fact that in 2001 the country had a labour force of 2,361,000. At the same time as these developments are taking place, we know that there is going to be a labour shortage in future.
In order to deal with these developments it was necessary to take some action, and the result was a letter of intent between the social partners and the government (the letter of intent is attached as an appendix). The letter of intent was signed on 3 October 2001 and is based on the idea that it is important to focus on the potential which individual citizens have rather than on the limitations resulting from illness or disability.
Objectives of the letter of intent
The aim of the letter of intent is to help us to achieve a more inclusive working life for the good of individual workers, workplaces and society, to achieve a reduction in the use of disability benefits and absence due to sickness and to make better use of the resources and manpower of older workers in working life.
The operational targets are to reduce absence due to sickness by 20%, to employ more workers with functional impairments and to increase the average age of retirement from working life by the end of 2003.
The workplace shall be the main battle ground for the initiatives on an inclusive working life. Employers will be under an increased obligation to work with employees on finding alternative work if they become ill in their current job. The objective is to find solutions in the individual workplace by, among other things, encouraging a more open dialogue between employers and employees. Since it is the workplace that is the main arena, businesses have been given a number of instruments to support the measures to be taken in individual businesses.
Key to the work at individual businesses is to focus on preventative efforts - finding out what it is at a particular place of work that is making the employees ill or influencing their inability to continue working when they grow older. In these preventative efforts, it is also important to focus on how the business is managed. Is the manager skilled in finding good solutions for individuals, and is the manager concerned enough about his staff? In other words, is the management of the business good enough?
The National Insurance Service's working life centres
The main responsibility for creating a more inclusive working life lies with working life itself. It is at the individual workplaces that good solutions must be found. However, experience shows, among other things, that businesses can lack competence when it comes to finding good solutions and taking the right measures. The letter of intent therefore obliges the authorities to support management and businesses in these efforts. This shall be done by providing guidance and by using economic instruments.
In order to take care of the tasks of the authorities and to ensure that the work is carried out with the necessary competence and effectiveness, working life centres have been set up in every county in the land. Some 19 working life centres were set up in Norway in the first half of 2002. The name given to each of these units is: The National Insurance Service's working life centre - a centre for inclusive working life.
The National Insurance Service's working life centres will be a driving force and partner in the work of ensuring a more inclusive working life for individuals, workplaces and society. There are already 300 people employed at these working life centres, but in time they will have 500 staff with a combined range of skills. An important principle in the staffing of the centres is to ensure good interdisciplinary skills so that people can deal with the various situations that people face in working life. For example, they shall have the skills to deal with disabled people with visual and hearing impairments, people with physical disabilities or with those who have cognitive disabilities.
An inclusive working life business
Any public or private sector business which wishes to do so can enter into the "Cooperation agreement on a more inclusive working life". The cooperation agreement is entered into between individual businesses and the working life centre. Businesses which have signed the agreement are approved as inclusive working life businesses. The National Insurance Service's working life centres shall provide information and guidance on monitoring procedures, the recording of absence and financial assistance schemes. When the agreement is entered into, the centre shall give advice and guidance on difficult cases and ensure that the National Insurance Service's financial instruments are activated quickly and effectively. In addition, the centres shall assist businesses with skills development and other development-oriented measures.
The first cooperation agreements were signed in February 2002. By the middle of July 2002 just over 800 businesses had signed such agreements. This means that around 12% of all Norwegian workers are currently working in inclusive working life businesses.
Rehabilitation perspective
The work of creating a more inclusive working life is about creating good procedures for rehabilitation and integrating them into working life in order to help give people with functional impairments more opportunities in working life. As a tool in this work, government aid schemes have been set up for employers who take on people who are receiving a disability pension but who are motivated to try to work. There are also financial assistance schemes for occupationally handicapped workers who have undergone occupational rehabilitation and for disabled people who want to try out a job.
The working life centres have and disseminate knowledge about the rehabilitation system and about how people can work together with the various bodies in the rehabilitation chain. One of the challenges is to put the work in connection with the letter of intent into a more holistic rehabilitation perspective. We must ensure that the work in connection with the aims of the letter of intent is anchored in a holistic plan for the individual person. It would be silly to have to work on the aims of the letter of intent on one front in isolation without involving other players in order to ensure a good total package. For example, it would not do much good to provide a good job if you do not at the same time find solutions for the transport needs to and from work. The chain of measures must be coherent and coordinated, and in particular, those who are to provide supporting measures in the chain must be coordinated. The working life centres therefore have the task of coordinating with other government bodies in cases where this is necessary.
Challenges
The letter of intent between the social partners and the authorities in Norway is a major new initiative to create a working life with room for all - a working life which includes everyone who wants to have a job.
The work which has been started will demand a lot of many people in order to succeed. In particular, it requires major changes in Norwegian working life. It will demand a greater commitment from Norwegian business leaders, new skills will have to be learned and, not least, attitudes towards those who cannot give themselves 100% to working life at all times will have to change.
Changes in attitudes are difficult to achieve. It will require the unlearning of prejudices and of old ways of seeing things, and requires us to have the ability to look at each other with new eyes. We must teach ourselves to look at the potential that individuals have in spite of illness or disability. We must stop focussing on the limitations which are entailed in having functional impairments. Changes in attitudes must take place both at the level of the society and the level of the individual. It is important that each and every one of us uses our influence wherever we can. Those of us who are in work must help to turn our workplaces into inclusive working life businesses. We must work actively to influence aims and we must work on attitudes. In this way we will help to create room for more people in the labour market - in a labour market that is more in line with that which suits everyone who wants to have a place in working life.
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