Disabilities and Employment

One wonders how people with a mental illness qualify in sport. They are disabled but usually not physical in any way so they must compete on even foot. Well obviously it should be, fair enough.

Surprisingly there are some athletes with severe physical bodily impediments who even compete against normal healthy people one thinks of the sprinter "the blade runner" from SA participating in the Olympic Games of 2012 qualifying in the heats for the races right up to the finals, against of the best athletes in the world. Such people are extremely strong and courageous. One can easily think of some other items for possible participation such as canoe races and team rowing events.

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Then of course we have employment equity. Persons with disablities such as blindness or wheel-chair users are easy to display and are visible to all so it seems we meet our equity targets. However for a deaf person for instance often it would be a problem to cope with, as such appearing quite normal to outsiders, of course on top of the disability itself.

Occasional odd appearence and behaviour is not acceptable by many colleagues and seen as reason why you can't "do your work". For instance finding a person strange and funny staff members and others could make remarks and jokes (literally even) behind his back, as you can think. As well as for example psychiatric patients deaf people are especially vulnerable and easy to terrorise.

The handicap here is not glaringly obvious and indeed such a person is often victimised by other staff members and seen only as a liability or a threat because of misunderstanding and ignorance. The victim then is regarded as necessarily impaired in general and it is believed that this implies an additional work load all-round and an extra burden on other staff members.

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However in fact when properly accomodated and correctly deployed we are in general very dedicated and hard workers and can make a very valuable contribution to almost any kind of organisation and to society for that matter, and could be very useful and a true asset according to talents training and experience.   

Employers turn the side that suits them and turn their coats to the wind. They might misuse a person for a disability quota as EE, or then just as well claimed to be unable to work productively on medical grounds, at the same time on purpose destroying his whole career and often just for an institution to simply save face. On the other hand, actually usually more as a threat and as the only alternative, it is easy to exploit a disablity or other handicaps in "constructive dismissal" with very little compensation.

Thus often there are staff members who might feel threatened and who exploit the weaknesses, systematically victimising and persecuting individual colleauges. Their whole career is sabotaged for whatever reasons. Still even now similar tactics are used against women, older persons and other minority groups.

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Of course there are many hundreds that are happily employed and accepted by the other staff, contributing their share and pulling their weight. We should learn from this. The key is in management. It can be done.

One thing that has to change is people's attitudes, and serious enforcement of law and the constitution. Also we must learn to think in terms of, "what can this indivual contribute?" rather than "cannot do this or that" so the person "is useless". In fact there are many people who are incredibly gifted who are just chucked in the basket together with crumpled pages of paper. What a relief!

PS. I have first-hand  knowledge of only South-Africa but I believe these and similar problems are quite universal.