A Bellwether? Oregon Sued for Reliance on Sheltered Workshops

Last month, UCP Oregon/SW Washington, with the help of Disability Rights Oregon, filed a class action lawsuit challenging Oregon’s failure to provide supported employment services to more than 2,300 of its residents who are segregated in sheltered workshops. The suit says people are "stuck in long-term, dead-end facilities that offer virtually no interaction with non-disabled peers, that do not provide any real pathway to integrated employment and that provide compensation that is well below minimum wage." 

Readers of this blog know that being stuck in a sheltered workshop is one of the core problems I believe face individuals with developmental disabilities today. One of the plaintiffs, Paula Lane, earned about 40 cents per hour in March, 2010, working on various benchwork tasks. Lane has repeatedly asked for a real job, according to the suit. She "cannot afford to participate in …many community activities."

This is indeed a case to keep an eye on. It's the first statewide class action suit against segregated work facilities. Sheltered workshops are not only obsolete, their cost-effectiveness is less than supported employment, and they have been found to actually hinder realizing job outcomes for people with disabilities. The case against continuing to segregate people with disabilities needlessly in day facilities is very strong, and includes not only research outcomes, but violations of civil rights and wasteful spending of government dollars.

Yet sheltered workshops are an entrenched part of the disability industrial complex. Over a half million people are attending them in the US, and states segregate more people every day. The real challenge should be to focus on "how" to change this system rather than "whether."

Unfortunately, many people, families and professionals among them, believe that some people "need" to be in such a facility. I don't agree, but I do understand where this perspective comes from. For example, one family posted in response to the lawsuit: "Yes the clients are largely segregated from non-disabled situations where they could not endure 'normal' work situations… clients are protected from terrible violations they might endure on the streets or at home."

Parents will naturally protect a son or daughter's perceived vulnerability. But we also need to understand that there is no evidence that workers with disabilities are more at risk than those in workshops, and funding facilities to provide needless "safety" comes at a cost – it has been proven to be ineffective for jobs and wages, and it is systematically preventing lots of people from living more meaningful lives. Changing a perception of the need for a segregated building (and thus "protection" from your own community!) is challenging. Workshops are not self-sustaining. They require ongoing tax dollars and the attendance of people with disabilities. Their existence requires people to be there. Money spent on facilities means less money spent on job development and job support for everyone.

Some people defend the segregated system because of the caring people who work at the facilities. For instance, this family noted: "…clients at the sheltered workshop have caring supervision and friendship of workshop staff. Our daughter views her supervisors as loved mentors." Of course. This happens in some institutions as well. Many years ago I ran an agency with a workshop, and the staff were fabulous. That's not the point. People are not placed in workshops to be near non-disabled staff mentors who are kind. It's not that staff aren't caring, it's the environment into which we are putting both staff and people, and what we are requiring them to do, and what it actually keeps people with disabilities from achieving.

Moving people out of a system that is currently expanding will require thoughtful planning. Again, we should transition from "whether or not" and start a conversation about "how" right now. Here are six principles to start that discussion:

1. Freeze new segregated workshop placements. We need to stop growing the problem. 
2. Set up a "Workshop Firewall" rule to prevent re-entry into a sheltered facility once a person leaves. Too many people use the facility as a safety net, when actually it is a life trap. 
3. Phase out, using a reasonable timeline, sub-minimum wages. Such wages are based on an outdated and inadequate idea of productivity and job customization. 
4. Develop a capacity-building initiative in supported employment, both nationally and state-by-state. This would include better training, employment service staff professionalization, and an investment in school-to-work, career development services, and agency collaboration. 
5. Launch marketing and education efforts to high-priority audiences such as families and employers.
6. Set national standards requiring each state to collect and report clear service and outcome data on employment supports.   

This is just a beginning outline, but I think you see where I am going. States such as Vermont no longer fund sheltered workshops, so we know others can successfully move in this direction. So keep on eye on Oregon. A lawsuit in one state can start an avalanche across the US and Canada - and one that's long overdue... 

Job Customization and the Babbage Principle: It's Nothing New

Charles Babbage was an inventor who in the mid-1800s first came up with the idea of a programmable computer. His design actually worked when a museum finally assembled it in 1991. He also was accomplished in math and economics, and he described what is now called the Babbage principle, which focuses on the advantages of the division of labor. Babbage described how highly skilled workers, who are usually also more highly paid, often spend parts of their job doing tasks where their skills are not really needed. 

This means an employer is paying for a skill not being used some of the time. He noted that divided labor is more efficient, because you can then reduce production costs by better matching each workers' skills with what needs to be done. 

This should sound familiar to employment professionals who do job carving or job customization. Many more workers with disabilities can be employed if employers would more specifically match what they need getting done to their labor pool. From the employer point of view, this would be a more efficient, cost-effective way of using labor. From the disability perspective, it should allow a broader range of opportunities for employment. 

But this approach is a radical departure from the way most businesses actually hire. More typically, employers look for job candidates with a broad skill set. And jobs are often defined as a fixed list of tasks for a position, forcing the worker to fit into all the perceived needed duties, regardless of skill, interests, or whether its the best use of his or her time, all done at one set salary level. And because this is the standard business model, it requires convincing employers about the benefits of customizing jobs to individual talents. This thus becomes a marketing challenge. 

Job customization using the Babbage Principle minimizes the need for job seekers with disabilities to compete with non-disabled workers who have a broader range of skills and experiences. Instead, candidates with disabilities are analyzed by their ability to get a task or sets of tasks done at a cost. And because they are pre-screened by disability employment providers (that is, if they have done career planning and "discovery" well), there is an added benefit. Again, job development and marketing must evolve to focus on this strength that disability employment providers can offer.

An important note - safeguards must be in place to ensure that workers with disabilities involved with job customization are not relegated to low-paying tasks only or placed in drudgery work. People with disabilities are often subject to mistaken perceptions, and the Babbage Principle could be misused to set up a new "class" of workers doing low-skill work at low pay just for business efficiency. So customized employment must always be careful in how this principle is applied, or risk further marginalizing workers with disabilities. 

You can learn how to better customize and safeguard job matches through a training presentation on-demand at TRN called Job Customization and Carving.

A Candid Conversation on Disability Issues

Recently, for a podcast sponsored by Griffin-Hammis Associates, Cary Griffin and I had a discussion about many facets of our service system. We talked about the resistance to change of sheltered work agencies, the needless persistence of sub-minimum wage, concerns we had about generalized employment training programs being developed for people with autism, flawed social enterprises, and other issues in the employment of people with disabilities. We also talked about what makes us optimistic and where successes with community integration were being found.

I've known Cary Griffin for over twenty plus years. He has been an extraordinary consultant and trainer in the disability field, and I have always considered him someone I could bounce ideas off of and get an honest answer. 

Sound interesting? Well, personally, I enjoyed it and found that it helped me clarify some things I feel strongly about. Rather than making some of the same points here, you can get the transcript of the conversation at http://trn-store.com/.

I think it's an authentic discussion that touches on a lot of things, of which I'm sure some people will have disagreements. But certainly, the disability field is in need to air differing views of the status quo. Why? For starters, we spend an awful lot of taxpayer dollars on services for people with disabilities that, by and large, have had a history of pretty ineffectual, and sometimes alarming outcomes. And we are still labeling people, only now in new ways.

As always, we invite respectful comments – I look forward to reading your reactions.

Have a wonderful holiday season, everyone, and, (wherever you do it!) thanks for all that you do.

The 80-20 Rule and A Call to Freeze Referrals to Sheltered Work

The Pareto Principle is a well known economic theory that can be applied to a lot of situations. It goes something like this: about 80% of effectiveness is driven by just 20% of our activity. This distribution has also been found to relate to how a small number of people control 80% of the wealth. Or in business, how 80% of your income comes from just 20% of your customers. (Interestingly, some theories also note how 80% of your life's problems comes from just 20% of those people you know…)

Whatever the actual percentages per situation, the 80-20 rule is fascinating in what it implies - that often we are involved with things that seem related to our goals, but are really not very significant to achieving them, and in fact can become distractions. We thus confuse being busy with accomplishment. But the Pareto Principle says that unless you are getting the right things done, your 'busyness' is just an illusion of progress. It's the difference between a shotgun that scatters its impact with laser surgery that focuses it where it needs to be.

Let's apply this to the continuing problem of segregation of people with disabilities. If we consider how little progress we have made with employment rates of people with disabilities, and how few segregated facilities have closed, one should wonder why this is. After all, we have had multi-million dollar system change grants, along with multitudes of conferences, research studies, and training over the years. We have definitely been busy. We've had lots of meetings, white papers, and hand-wringing on employment rates.

One problem as I see it is that within all these initiatives, we have not focused on the few that might matter at a systems level. For example, we invest money and time and then teach and promote a myriad of new and creative employment strategies that are applied for far too few people. It's great to know creative ways to find a vocation; we do need this kind of information. But it's now been over 30 years since the dawn of supported employment; I think we have enough of what we need by now to get going. Sure, things will progress and we will learn better ways of doing things. But this is like ignoring a burning building to repair the front steps. It's long past time to prioritize!

I would propose that if you want people to eventually be employed and not spend their days in a segregated facility, you need a basic and realistic policy starting place. That is, you have to stop letting people now entering the adult service system to even gain entry into sheltered workshop services. Simply stop the workshop referrals now, and you at least "freeze" the magnitude of a problem that every day grows larger. 

This is of course just a simplistic step, and no real comprehensive solution, but it is the initial necessary baseline for change. It will take years to completely phase out workshops, and there will be real political and social battles along the way. Like deinstitutionalization, people will complain about losing a service option, albeit one shown ineffective and potentially exploitive. But at least the problem won't get worse than it already is and thus more difficult. And we won't be unnecessarily sentencing young people to lifelong segregation needlessly while we spend precious resources on facilities and their related expenses.

Are there other steps within the Pareto Principle that apply? I think there are at least two more as starters. One would be an extension of the non-admission policy toward people who leave the workshop for employment. In other words, if they lose their job, they cannot return to the workshop. And still another would be the phasing out of sub-minimum wage. I will blog further about these in my coming posts and talk more about how to phase out facilities. 

Taken together, we might find that prioritizing our strategies for change might make more sense than continuing a shotgun approach of just promoting everything that seems a bit better than a workshop, then hoping for the best. I'm afraid the evidence has come in on that approach, and it hasn't worked.