Let’s discuss Competitive Integrative Employment! In this episode of the PandA Pod, Cheryl Bates-Harris, NDRN’s Senior Disability Advocacy Specialist, provides recommendations and actionable steps for employers to transition from a segregated model to a competitive model for workers with disabilities.

Xuan Truong:

Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us on the PandA Pod, here at the National Disability Rights Network. My name is Xuan and I am the summer 2021 policy intern, here at NDRN. Today, we have our very own Cheryl Bates-Harris for a conversation around competitive integrated employment. Thanks for joining us, Cheryl.

Cheryl Bates-Harris:

Thank you for having me, Xuan, I appreciate the invitation. I’m Cheryl Bates-Harris with the National Disability Rights Network. And, once upon a time, I worked in a sheltered workshop and thought that it was, probably, the best thing since sliced bread. But, that was about 35 years ago, before I started to understand that sheltered workshops are isolating individuals with disabilities, paying them sub-minimum wage, doing menial work that large businesses typically don’t want to do, so they think they’re doing a favor by sending work to sheltered workshops. And, I think my lesson from working in a sheltered workshop was that there was very little interest in actually promoting these people and allowing them true opportunities for employment.

While I was there, I did job placement and I thought my job was to place people with disabilities into competitive integrated employment. And yet, when individuals who were working in the sheltered workshop came to me and asked me to help move them into competitive employment, I was called into the principal’s office, i.e. the executive director’s office, and told to leave our employees alone. We needed them to complete the contract work that we had, and that my job was to work with the individuals who came through our training program. So, consequently, I moved on from there because it just didn’t seem right that some people were being offered the opportunity for real jobs, and yet some very capable individuals in sheltered employment were basically stuck there for life because nobody wanted them to leave.

Xuan Truong:

So, let’s say if a sheltered workshop wanted to change their model to a competitive integrated one, what does that look like?

Cheryl Bates-Harris:

That’s an interesting question, and that’s something that isn’t going to happen overnight. First of all, it is going to involve a paradigm-shift of thinking that people with disabilities no longer need to be segregated and protected from the real world. So, it would require some philosophical changes in thought and convincing, or having, the staff at the agency adopt and believe in the full employment of people with disabilities. And then, from there, some additional resources and some creative thinking in terms of the fact that when you’re running a sheltered workshop, your staff ratio is typically one staff person to every 15 or 20 individuals in order to really do competitive integrated employment. Jobs are obtained one person at a time, so it’s much more labor intensive in terms of staffing ratios, lower staffing ratios, it’s going to require some additional resources and some funding.

I think the other part of it is also that staff who have traditionally worked and supervised employees in a sheltered workshop are used to looking at things from a production standpoint. And, when you convert to competitive integrated employment, you need to look at it through a human resource development lens, which is a whole lot different and will require some training in order to up-skill the skills of the individuals that are working with people with disabilities. So, it’s a gradual process. It’s not something that you can do overnight, but it’s really important that it occur because young adults of today have benefited from free public education and their expectations are, they don’t want to perpetuate the old thinking and focus on the disability. They want real opportunities.

Xuan Truong:

So, let’s say if a sheltered workshop wanted to transition out and they wanted to really help their employers find other employment, what resources or supports are available to those employers?

Cheryl Bates-Harris:

The first place that I would start, if I was a sheltered workshop, would be by contacting the businesses that we are doing contract work for because, clearly, the work that goes into a sheltered workshop is legitimate work that some business needs done. Now, the fact that they send it to a sheltered workshop to do, out-of-sight, out-of-mind, doesn’t negate the fact that it is legitimate work. So, I would start by contacting those businesses and saying, let’s change our business model a little bit. Instead of you sending this work to the sheltered workshop, where we warehouse the materials, we supervise the employees doing the work, and we just give you a finished product, how about hiring a few of our individuals to do that same work, but instead of doing it for us, they do it for you, as a regular employee within your facility.

And, I think that you will find that once people with disabilities get into the real business or the real job setting, that they have skills far beyond what anybody imagined, and people will demonstrate a natural interest in the work that’s going on around them. They’ll be able to interact with people and their curiosity will allow them to demonstrate that there’s other things that they can do besides just the menial part of the labor that you send to the sheltered workshop. But, of course, employers may be reluctant to hire them because they’d never dealt with a person with a disability and like, “Oh my God, what happens if they can’t do the work?” Or, “What happens if they hurt themselves?” The sheltered workshop could offer support in the form of job coaches that go into the business and support the people with disabilities that are working there.

And, when I mean support, it’s not doing the job for the person with the disability, but demonstrating to the person with the disability how the work is done, what they need to do with their work product when they’re finished with it, encouraging them to work a little faster, or to stay focused. And, it can also be things like helping the person organize themselves so that they can get to the work site, because, oftentimes, it’s the bus that’s picked them up in the morning and taking them to the sheltered workshop. Now, they may need some travel training in order to be able to utilize what public transportation is available. Now, their work hours might shift a little bit, so they may need some reminders or ticklers to remember that you have to now go to the bus stop 30 minutes earlier. There’s all kinds of supports that a job coach can provide to the individual who’s working to make sure that they are successful.

And, it’s also reminding the employer that there are public supports that are available. For instance, if somebody demonstrates an interest in doing a particular job, and I’m going to use an example of, say, operating a piece of machinery, but they have limited motion or limited use of one particular hand, it’s possible that through the job accommodations network, they could look at what are some possible accommodations to the particular job of that person that could be done. So, many of the accommodations that a person might need to be successful don’t cost a lot of money, but if you’ve never done the accommodation before, you don’t know what it is, and there’s lots of experts out there that can help with that. There’s also something called the “disabled access credit” that actually would allow the employer, who’s paying the normal wages, access to tax credits in order to make modifications to their work site, in order to encourage and enable the employment of people with disabilities.

So, the change from sheltered workshop to competitive employment can be a little bit complicated, but there’s lots of resources out there to help. What we really need, though, is for businesses to believe in the full employment of people with disabilities and to also not discriminate against people with disabilities, who are otherwise qualified to do the work. And, many individuals with disabilities have no idea what they’re capable of doing because they’ve never had the opportunity to do anything other than the prescribed work in the sheltered workshop.

Xuan Truong:

When a competitive integrated employment is implemented, what does that look like?

Cheryl Bates-Harris:

That looks like individuals with disabilities working in the same jobs as their non-disabled peers, earning the same wages as their non-disabled peers, having the same benefits as their non-disabled peers, and individuals with disabilities obtaining a job. One job at a time. One job equals one person. It’s ceasing to do the group placements of people where we’re going to place six or eight people doing landscaping for rest stop areas. It’s competitive integrated employment is what each of us get. We apply for jobs, we interview for jobs, and we’re hired, and that should be exactly the same process for people with disabilities, because they have the ability and have demonstrated there’s thousands of jobs in the U.S. economy that people can do, but you’re not going to get competitive integrated employment if we’re still thinking that everybody needs supervision and everybody has to work in a group where that supervision can be closely provided. So, it’s one person, one job, real wages.

Xuan Truong:

So, explain to us why CIE, or “competitive integrated employment”, is beneficial. You gone into why it’s beneficial for the persons with disabilities. What about the employers, or society as a whole?

Cheryl Bates-Harris:

Well, this country is really at a critical error where there is, believe it or not, a shortage of the labor market. And, there’s going to be a huge retirement tsunami of the Baby Boomers. So, many businesses have had to look towards both immigrants for filling positions, as well as senior citizens. There’s lots of jobs out there, there’s lots of new growing areas in the economy. And, employers are only going to make money if they get their business needs met, and people with disabilities can be significant contributors to their bottom line. We’re not asking employers to hire somebody just because they have a disability, we’re asking employers to hire people who are otherwise qualified to do the work, would love to do the work, and will contribute to their bottom line.

So, there’s lots of people who’ve been denied the opportunity to work, and they really want to, and we are well beyond the days where we believe that segregating people and being very paternalistic to protect them is the right thing to do. It’s not. Competitive integrated employment means that people will be contributing to their economy, they’ll be paying taxes, they’ll be participating in their community. It’s just a much better option than keeping people in poverty by paying sub-minimum wages and keeping them in segregated employment where they don’t get the full benefits of participation in society.

Xuan Truong:

Are there examples or models of CIE that are out there that exist?

Cheryl Bates-Harris:

I think there are lots of different models, and there is not necessarily a right way or a wrong way to do it. I think a lot of it really has to do with commitment of, and belief of, the ability of people with disabilities. One very, very good model, that I really like, that leads to or contributes towards competitive integrated employment is the project search model. And, the project search model originated out of the children’s hospital in Cincinnati. And, what they did there was they brought a number of individuals with very significant disabilities into the hospital setting for basically a nine-month period of time and, I believe, there were three periods of rotation. And, instead of bringing these people into the hospital and saying, “We’re going to teach you how to do housekeeping”, they actually place them into different areas of the hospital where there was a need for work to be done.

For instance, sterilizing and putting together kits for individuals that would be undergoing surgery, filling the inventory supplies throughout each of the nurse’s stations, there. One of the positions involved taking apart and disinfecting, and then reassembling, the incubation neonatal intensive care unit, putting those together. And, though it’s bringing people into areas and training them how to do the jobs that are specifically needed in the hospital. That’s how project search started. But now, they’ve expanded to all kinds of different occupations. There are project search units on utilizing different banking skills and customer service jobs. The Department of Transportation in Delaware has a project search unit where they have people working, everything from planning and development of new transportation, to helping develop transit routes, their system for managing and dispatching. I mean, those kinds of things. So, project search gives individuals with significant disabilities an opportunity to actually try different kinds of jobs that lead to real jobs within the community.

One of the key components to competitive integrated employment is really taking a look at what are the individual’s skills, and many individuals, if you asked them, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, they’re not going to be able to tell you because nobody’s ever asked them that question before. So, really taking the time to develop, “What is this person all about? What gets them excited in their day? When do they really light up?” So, when you can develop and build a picture of what are they really interested in, what do they really like, then you can start to think creatively around what kind of job would be appropriate for that person that’s going to match their skills and their interests. So, the real big point with competitive integrated employment is it’s a one-on-one process. And, it does require some thinking if people are self-directed and they can identify their skills and their interests, then those skills and interests should be acknowledged and not ignored.

And, people should not be scripted into jobs they don’t want to do. Different states have approached competitive integrated employment differently. And, employment first is the original impetus towards moving to competitive employment because employment first is a philosophy, first of all, that believes in the first dollar of support should go toward supporting employment. And, what it does then, is it directs agencies, all of the agencies, the State Vocational Rehabilitation Agency, the Medicaid agency, the Department of Education, the Office of Developmental Disabilities, or whatever it happens to be called, and even the Social Security Administration, to work together to focus the dollars for support on moving people into individual jobs, real jobs, real wages.

Xuan Truong:

What can listeners do to find out more about what’s going on in their state?

Cheryl Bates-Harris:

I think there’s a number of things they can do. Certainly, there is legislation that is happening across the country around eliminating the legality of paying individual sub-minimum wage. And, there are seven or eight states that have eliminated sub-minimum wage. The elimination of sub-minimum wage, I firmly believe, will further contribute to the employment of people with disabilities because businesses will no longer be able to take advantage of people with disabilities and make lots of money on the backs of people with disabilities. So then, the whole concept of segregation loses its shine. And, if you’re paying higher wages, then employers will start to think that maybe we don’t have the capacity to keep employing these people in a segregated setting. So, I think looking at some minimum wage laws is one of the issues, certainly tracking and looking at how are the different departments of the state spending their money.

For instance, Medicaid dollars are notorious for supporting segregated employment. Do we really, in the year 2021, want to continue to use federal dollars to basically keep people in poverty by segregating them and holding them to a low standard of behavior or expectation? You can also look at some of the grassroots organizations in your states. APSE, which stands for the Association of People Supporting Employment, first, is probably the only national organization whose sole focus is on the employment of people with disabilities. Certainly, looking at and challenging your state Vocational Rehabilitation Agency. Ever since 1973, there has been a stipulation in the Rehabilitation Act that says if a VR agency does not have enough money to meet the needs of all applicants and/or clients of the state Vocational Rehabilitation Agency, then they are to provide services to individuals with the most significant disabilities first, and, historically, individuals in segregated employment have never been to vocational rehabilitation. They’ve never collected $200 worth of services.

And so, the VR agencies in not providing services to individuals with most significant disabilities are failing to meet the intent. So, holding your VR agency responsible for providing services, as they’re required, and having the VR agency send other individuals with disabilities, who may just need a job, sending them to the generic workforce system, instead. People need to understand that if you’re a person with a disability who just needs a job, you don’t need VR services. And, the people who do need VR services should no longer be shuttled to a sub-minimum wage employer. So, it’s making sure that everybody is held accountable for fulfilling the mission of what they’re supposed to do.

Xuan Truong:

So, in closing, what is one thing that you want listeners to take away from this podcast?

Cheryl Bates-Harris:

I want people to understand that people with disabilities are just like everybody else, that they all have skills and talents that they can contribute to employment, that they can make contributions to society, that they can work. And, it’s time that we start looking and assume the full employability of people because, quite frankly, most of the people who are in segregated employment settings and are being paid sub-minimum wage, are recipients of SSI, supplemental security income. And, in some instances, social security disability insurance.

When we keep people in segregated employment and/or out of employment, we are dooming them to a life of poverty, and the ADA gave us the promise of full inclusion into both the social and economic landscapes of the land. And, until we allow people with disabilities to work to their full potential, we are dooming them to a life of poverty. And, I do not believe that life of poverty is really what we want for our children or our family members who have disabilities, and competitive employment is a viable option. We just have to believe in the value of people with disabilities and stop treating them like second-class citizens who do not deserve time or investment.

Xuan Truong:

That was beautiful. Thank you so much.

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