Workers with disabilities: The role of flexible employment schemes

Introduction

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) defines disability as problems in human functioning that are categorised as impairments, activity limitations and participation restrictions. Participation restriction specifically includes problems with involvement in any area of life, such as facing discrimination in employment. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2010, approximately 1 billion people, which consists of 15 percent of the global population, have some form of disability and employment rates for people with disabilities are below that of the overall population (WHO, 2011). The ratio of the employment rate of people with disabilities to the employment rate of people without disabilities ranges between 0.46 to 0.91 for the population aged 20—54 in European Countries (Scharle & Csillag, 2016).

One of the biggest challenges for labour market policies has always been the integration of disabled people. Disabled people facing barriers and possible discrimination in the labour market are likely to remain unemployed, especially in the long-term, which has adverse consequences for the individual, the society and the economic system. Therefore, some governments pay special attention to people with disabilities who need to be better integrated into the labour market. For instance, encouraging full participation of people with disabilities in the labour market is a key element of EU policies (Official Journal of EU, Art. 8, 2003).

Policies addressing disabled people are various in the form of active labour market policies, such as “supported employment”, which supports the adaptation of the person in the workplace, “subsidised employment” that removes barriers during the recruitment processes, “vocational rehabilitation and training”, which aims to improve the job skills of the people with disabilities, “quota schemes” that require employers to employ a certain minimum number of workers ensuring that a given proportion of employees consists of designated persons with disabilities. Other policies include “anti-discrimination schemes”, which provide conditions for equal participation to work and

“flexible employment schemes (flexible working conditions)”, which refers to flexible working hours and working at home or other remote locations instead of the firm’s premises.

Sheltered employment, incentives for job search assistance and counselling and for start-ups are also other examples of the active labour market policies (Thornton & Lunt, 1997; Greve, 2009; WHO, 2011). Moreover, there are passive labour market policies where disabled people rely on social benefits, such as unemployment, disability, sickness and injury allowances. The main criticism of social benefits is that they may prevent the unemployed from searching for jobs, therefore increasing unemployment duration and demotivating the unemployed from returning to work (Ljungqvist & Sargent, 2008). The evidence shows that the employment rates among disabled people were higher in countries in which spending on “active” labour policies was the highest, such as Sweden and Denmark compared with France, Greece, Italy and the UK (Eurostat, 2011).

The use of flexible employment schemes is one of the active labour market policies and this chapter discusses its role on the labour outcomes of disabled workers, such as job satisfaction, absenteeism, employee loyalty and performance at work. The evaluation of flexible employment schemes will be carried out based on earlier studies in the related literature and the empirical work done by Giovanis and Ozdamar (2019). A number of qualitative research studies based on interviews with disabled people show that more flexible working conditions would be extremely valuable due to various problems, such as accessibility, transportation, physical conditions of many working places, stigma and discriminatory practices, that exist in the workplace (Leicester, 1999; Marsay, 2014).

Positive inference from this chapter’s evaluation about flexible employment schemes would provide some supportive evidence for their assumptive benefits and would be suggestive for starting to remove barriers to using them. The traditional work environment has barriers such as culture of presenteeism, a risk-averse culture, a lack of guidance at the level of individual employee and a lack of senior sponsorship at the highest level of a company to undertake flexible employment schemes (Future of Work Institute, 2012). Moreover, there are barriers for employees to request work flexibility in many countries in the world except for selected countries, such as New Zealand, Australia and the European Union member states, where all employees have the legal right to request a flexible work arrangement.¹ Thus, revealing the positive effect of flexible employment schemes on labour outcomes would confront and overcome those barriers.