Canadian program creates theatre performance about hiring people with disabilities

From Helen Henderson, Disabilities Reporter at The Toronto Star. In the picture, Anthony Curry and Carrie Gibson star in Not Just Ramps, a play about physical and emotional access issues, to be presented in September by the Job Opportunity Information Network for Persons with Disabilities.

It’s one thing to know your rights, quite another to know how to make them a reality.

The law is on your side if you have a disability and need some flexibility or a particular piece of equipment to make the workplace a level playing field. But how do you handle the issue in a job interview?

“If I waited for an organization to make accommodations to get a job, I’d be always unemployed.”

That’s how one participant put it in a report on a recent roundtable dialogue on workplace inclusion sponsored by Deloitte Canada. “The onus can’t just be on organizations. If we want to make a difference, we should be able to advocate for ourselves.”

Easier said than done.

How do you talk about disability when you’re looking for a job? How do prospective employees and employers explore what they can offer each other? Answering that question is part of the mission of Ontario’s Job Opportunity Information Network (JOIN), a network of community agencies that helps disabled people find jobs and employers recruit qualified candidates with disabilities.

JOIN released the Deloitte report at a business leadership network breakfast this summer. It’s developing a mentoring program to help job seekers with the interview process and for its next business leadership function this month, it will be presenting a little bit of theatre.

Not Just Ramps, featuring Anthony Curry and Carrie Gibson, looks at emotional as well as physical access issues.

As the actors put it, they aim to “explore access on a multitude of levels.” That includes understanding society’s broadly based fear of disabilities, demystifying the labels applied to people with disabilities and affirming the concept of human dignity.

“Making diversity a priority in Canadian organizations is imperative — not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it is critical to the future success of our businesses and our economy, the Deloitte Canada report argues.

“While some progress has been made in the areas of race and gender, people with disabilities continue to be significantly under-represented in our workplaces,” Jane Allen the company’s chief diversity officer says in introducing the report. “Their numbers are growing steadily . . . and it is becoming increasingly important to include this community in corporate Canada.”

Allen says job seekers with disabilities “have to be proactive” in terms of working out the accommodations they need. Learning how to do that effectively will be part of the mentoring project planned with JOIN, she adds.

But the advantages of hiring qualified people with disabilities to businesses are made very clear in the report.

Citing a Statistics Canada survey, it notes that 90 per cent of people with disabilities did as well or better at their jobs than non-disabled co-workers, 86 per cent rated average or better in attendance and staff retention among people disabilities was 72 per cent higher.

Many senior management teams understand the business case for diversity, the Deloitte report notes. However, it adds, “unfortunately, most hiring decisions are made by recruiters and middle managers . . . If those groups are not educated on the benefits of diversity, the need to be inclusive of people with disabilities and the organization’s business case, there will be barriers in the company’s hiring practices.”

For inclusion to work, the Deloitte report emphasizes: “Our number one challenge is attitude — not just of the potential employer, but also of the person with the disability. The individuals must challenge their ideas of themselves and their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as their compromised self-esteem or self-confidence.”