RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Disabled Create Own Niche at Workplace

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Jun 7 2001 (IPS) - Ajith Kannangara’s fingers curve over the round lids of brown, blue, green, pink and yellow plastic containers, while deftly peeling off stickers and slapping them on.

He will never see the bright colours of the containers, which will eventually hold different flavours of ice cream.

At the other corner of the same table, Padmasiri Wijekoon pulls apart individual ice cream spoons from a bunch that has come on a long stem from the production line. He works undistracted, without pausing, even while talking to his colleague.

Kannangara and Wijekoon have two things in common — they are blind but lucky. They are among less than 10 percent of one million people in Sri Lanka who are disabled but employed.

The remaining 90 percent, suffering from various disabilities, languish in a world of their own, pushed there by a society that assumes that to be disabled is to be unemployable in this country of 18.5 million people.

However, a few companies in Sri Lanka have proven this premise wrong and have been employing people with disabilities since the early 1980s.

“We do not employ the disabled on the grounds of sympathy. We check out their abilities and give them a job to suit that. We also follow the policy of equal pay, whether they are able or disabled,” says Anver Dole, factory director of CEI Plastics at Piliyandala on the outskirts of the capital, Colombo. The company is one of the biggest suppliers of plastic goods in Sri Lanka.

This experiment which began after Dole’s involvement with the Lions movement. Seeing the capability of those at the Ratmalana School for the Deaf and Blind, where Dole taught English voluntarily, also paid off.

CEI Plastics has around 350 employees on its roll, including 14 who are fully or partially blind and five with other “drawbacks” as Dole puts it. Among them, only one is a woman for the others have left to get married and start their own small businesses.

“Those days the company bought 100 big bars of soap a month from the open market. But now one of the girls who left her job to get married makes soap as a cottage industry along with her husband to meet this demand,” he says.

“They are very good at repetitive work. At first there were a few concerns — how they would move around the work environment, with multi-storey buildings, how they would interact with the others or how the others would treat them. Ultimately they were all non-existent concerns,” says Dole.

The disabled employees’ total focus on the job at hand is evident and their absenteeism rate much lower than the other employees, he says, adding that their output too is higher. Kannangara, 29, pastes about 450 stickers an hour, while the able workers do only about 250, according to Dole.

In recent times, the Employers’ Federation of Ceylon (EFC), with a membership of 450 of Sri Lanka’s top firms including 23 plantation companies and an employee base of 600,000, has been helping other companies tap disabled people for semi-skilled and skilled jobs.

The federation has set up the Employers’ Network on Disability to involve employers directly in promoting job opportunities for the disabled.

Among the many tasks it hopes to handle are identifying jobs for the disabled, examining recruitment policies and providing guidance on vocational training based on employer needs.

“The companies which have hired the disabled on their own initiative have had a very positive response,” says Gotabaya Dasanayaka, EFC director-general. “We are conscious of our social responsibility.”

Social service ministry officials say that proposed laws are being drafted, for sanction by parliament soon, to provide the disabled equal rights in employment, wages and facilities in public buildings and other support.

They say that although a 1988 government circular requires that three percent of all employment in the state sector is to be reserved for the disabled, very few disabled people are actually recruited by state agencies.

Dasanakaya says the private sector as the principal engine of economic growth must harness every possible human resource, including the disabled, thus doing a duty to the country and also benefiting enterprise.

G Wanniarachchi, a human rights specialist, says that unfortunately society tends to see the disabled as a person who is crippled or one who is lying in bed in an institution.

“Such persons who are severely disabled are less than two percent of the disabled population. Most of the rest of the disabled have got the label ‘disabled’ just because they have some physical, sensory or mental impairment. An impairment can cause a disability, but that does not make a person non-able,” he adds.

The dedication is obvious in petite, 28-year-old M G Kusumawathie, the only woman worker among the disabled employees at the CEI Plastics factory as she packs similar-shaped plastic cola bottles in large boxes. “I am boarded in a house close to the factory and try to come to work everyday,” she smiles as she gets on with her job.

The disabled are good at overcoming hurdles, because they meet them all the time.

Wijekoon, 30, travels to work daily from his half-built home, using a white cane to walk one and a half miles to the bus route and taking two buses to his workplace. Like most of the others, he had lost his sight when he was about six due to anaemia.

Working has given him independence and is ensuring that part of his dream of buying and building a place of his own comes true.

Kannangara is sad that he lost the weak vision he had in one eye only very recently, but is determined to better himself at his job. “We don’t want sympathy, only support to make maximum use of our capabilities,” he stresses.

Indeed, these capabilities are often hidden at first, says Susan Scott-Parker, chief executive of the United Kingdom-based Employers’ Forum on Disability, who spoke at a workshop organised by the EFC last week.

Recalling her days as a swimming teacher for the disabled when she was 16 years old in Canada, Scott-Parker says: “When they came to the pool, they looked as if they could not do anything. Some of them had cerebral palsy, others various disabilities. But the moment they got into the water, their spirits came through. They were free of their disabilities.”

“The stereotype we have in mind is that they (people with disabilities) are unable to cope,” explains Scott-Parker, who in 1986 set up the first group in the European Union that works toward making it easier to employ disabled people and serve disabled customers.

“But what must be remembered is that they have already gone through a hostile environment and are capable of managing,” she explains.

RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Disabled Create Own Niche at Workplace

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Jun 7 2001 (IPS) - Ajith Kannangara’s fingers curve over the round lids of brown, blue, green, pink and yellow plastic containers, while deftly peeling off stickers and slapping them on.
(more…)