Promoting the social integration of persons with disabilities and persons with changed working capacity

Key points

The EESC:

• regrets that exclusion from the labour market is still a widespread issue, especially affecting women with disabilities and people with the most severe disabilities and believes that solutions like sheltered employment often end up perpetrating segregation;

• urges the Member States to promote policies and measures that strengthen access to the open labour market and the Commission. to implement the related policy actions under the Disability Employment Package;

• calls on the Member States to step up the employment of persons with disabilities, for example through a joint fund for reasonable accommodation. Such fund would be financed by private and public employers who fall short of any set quotas;

• considers that any incentives related to State aid should be conditional on respect for workers’ rights and in line with the CRPD, the CRPD Committee and the EU Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities;

• calls for the positive employment measures to include incentives for entrepreneurship among persons with disabilities, both individually and collectively;

• advocates uniformity and coherence when it comes to establishing the rules for and implementing reasonable accommodation, and would like to see dissemination of the guide Reasonable accommodation at work – Guidance and good practice, which can help raise awareness and increase skills in this area;

• stresses the need to establish standards to identify and compare models and services implemented by national public employment services (PES) through benchmarking in order to identify good practices based on actual data and to promote mutual learning;

• calls for quantitative and qualitative data to be collected specifically with regard to sheltered employment, in order to get a picture of the phenomenon and the trends;

• draws attention to the fact that advances in technology and AI can make it easier for persons with disabilities to participate in the open market; it calls for policies aimed at making these advances more widely known and at promoting their potential, accessibility and affordability to be supported.