When Christoph Lischka applied for a job at UniCredit Bank Austria in Vienna, he wasn’t sure whether to mention his illness. He was afraid he’d be turned down if he said he had Crohn’s disease, a chronic illness of the intestines, which typically prevented him from working for about six weeks each year. It was the reason he’d lost his previous job.
“In Austria, you are legally allowed to hold back that you have an illness during a job interview,” Lischka says. “But in the end, I decided it would be better to tell the truth.”
To his surprise, the interviewer didn’t regard his illness as a problem. “She gave me the job – and told me that because of my disability, I was entitled to an extra week’s holiday and extra employment protection,” he says. “It was the first time I’d come across a company that gladly hires people with a disability. I felt so relieved that I could freely mention my condition without negative consequences.”
Lischka was 16 when the doctor told him he had Crohn’s disease. “It was really difficult to be so young and so ill; it gave me the feeling I wasn’t equal to healthy people,” he says. “But now, suddenly, I was being treated like a normal employee. This year I was made a team leader – I feel so lucky.”
In Austria, the law requires companies with more than 24 employees to ensure that 4% of their personnel are people with a disability. Companies that do not comply have to pay a fine; severely disabled people enjoy extra legal protection against dismissal.
Bank Austria actively tries to attract disabled employees (its job advertisements all contain the phrase: “Applications from people with disabilities are explicitly desired”). Around 7% of its 5,873 employees are people with some kind of disability – significantly more than the law requires.
“We do this because we find that people with disabilities who work in the right job give 100%,” explains Matthias Raftl, the bank’s head of media relations. “We also find that when these people get the opportunity to create their own success stories, they strongly identify with the company. Successful experiences are at least as important to people with disabilities as they are to non-disabled people.”
Bank Austria has appointed two disability managers, who are charged with coming up with solutions that enable employees with a disability to work as efficiently as possible. “We have many clients with a disability, so it’s only fair to also offer job opportunities to people with a disability,” says Erwin Schauer, who has been a disability manager since 2010. Back then, this was a totally new kind of job.
Schauer himself struggles with several severe illnesses: chronic hepatitis, skin cancer and polyneuropathy. His disability is rated at 80%, which means officially he need only work for 20% of the time. In fact, he works full-time.
“What disabled people need are jobs tailored to their possibilities,” he says. “I work 40 hours per week and it really does me a lot of good. I am too busy to think about my illnesses. It’s a win-win situation: employees with a disability are often very loyal and involved. They want to lead normal lives, so having a stable job is extremely important to them.”
He describes an account manager at the bank who lost her short-term memory and most of her sight after having a stroke. “We made sure she could continue to work,” he says. “Not in the same job, of course – but with the help of a special computer screen and a personal assistant, she is now able to do data collection.”
Schauer’s co-disability manager, Norbert Knopp, says working closely with a disabled colleague has been a valuable experience. “It’s opened my eyes to small things that can be very important. Erwin has difficulty standing upright for a long time, so when we do a presentation together I’m always aware that at a certain point he’ll need to sit down. It’s become second nature to me; he only needs to glance at me and I know how he’s doing.”
Knopp says Schauer’s physical condition has deepened their working relationship: “Normally with a colleague, one would talk about one’s last holiday and that would be it. But because Erwin and I sometimes need to discuss serious health problems, our relationship has gained great depth. I am 63 years old and, although I am not suffering like Erwin, there are times when I struggle with my health as well. The wonderful thing is he always has a ready ear for me too.”
Austria isn’t the only country with a quota law regarding employment of disabled people: Germany, France, Italy, Spain and many Asian countries have similar legislation. Others such as Sweden, Norway and the US believe anti-discrimination legislation is more effective, but only the UK has actually abandoned a quota system (in 1995), preferring to rely on anti-discrimination legislation since then.
A visit to Bank Austria suggests introducing quotas for workers with disabilities can only be a positive step – but leading disability experts are more equivocal. “The truth is there are very few statistics about the impact of disability quotas,” says Christopher Prinz, disability lead at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). “Basically, there is no clear evidence that [this policy] really works.”
In 2007, researchers from Bonn’s Institute for the Study of Labour looked into the Austrian disability quota system, and found it helped severely disabled people with a job to keep that job. However, the study also found the system made it harder for unemployed people with a disability to find a job, because companies were aware it would be very difficult to dismiss them.
Two years later, in a second survey, the same researchers concluded the system may increase employment of disabled people – but only at the expense of non-disabled workers.
“This is not an easy issue,” says Prinz. “We do know, however, that countries with a quota by no means have the highest levels of disabled people in employment. The highest numbers are found in countries with high overall employment rates, such as the Nordic countries.”
Prinz concludes that the best way to ensure high employment rates among disabled people is to have a good overall employment policy and a healthy labour market. “It’s not so much the particular interventions targeted at disabled people that make the difference,” he says, “but the general policies.”
There is another problem with the Austrian quota system: not everybody complies. In fact currently, according to government statistics, only 23% of the companies meet the quota.
“Employers think the sanctions are relatively low, so many companies prefer to pay the fine instead of hiring disabled people,” says Michael Fuchs, from the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research. “There is also the problem that we have an ageing population, which means the percentage of disabled people will only increase. In the future, companies might just be able to meet the quota with their ageing workforce, instead of employing new disabled people. That means either the quota system becomes useless, or you have to raise the percentages.”
Nevertheless, Prinz says it would be unwise for Austria to abolish its disability quota law. “The good thing about it is the fines are used for employment programmes for disabled people,” he observes. “If you take the system away, the funding for employment interventions for disabled people is gone.”
Barbara Reisenbichler, who works as an operational risk manager for Bank Austria, says she is grateful for the quota system, no matter what the experts may think. She has an orthopaedic disability that prevents her from sitting or standing for a long time, and needs to take regular breaks to make her muscles relax.
“I have a disability, but I don’t need to worry about discrimination in the workplace and that’s very important to me,” she says. “My employer evaluates my work, not the way I do it, which is really good for my self-esteem. I’m really happy we have a quota law here.”
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