Japan raised the legally mandated employment rate for people with disabilities from 2.5% to 2.7% in July. About 60% of small and midsize companies still fall short of the standard, according to a survey by the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Among companies with 50 or fewer employees, roughly half had made no effort to hire at all.
The survey pointed to a lack of staff capacity for training as one factor. Author Hirotada Ototake, writing in a contributed piece, argues that meeting a headcount target is not the same as making a hire work.
The exit, not the entrance
Companies are required to report how many people with disabilities they employ. Far less attention goes to how many stay, Ototake wrote. A survey by the Japan Organization for Employment of the Elderly, Persons with Disabilities and Job Seekers found that one year after starting work, 60.8% of people with physical disabilities and 49.3% of people with mental disabilities were still in their jobs.
Ototake said those figures cannot be compared directly with retention rates for new graduates because the survey conditions differ. Even so, the gap with workers without disabilities is plain, he wrote.
Hiring to fill a number
The reason hires do not last, in Ototake's view, is that companies put matching the person to the job second and filling the quota first. Work is a means of earning a living, he wrote, but it also has to offer purpose and a sense of fulfillment. Staying in a workplace that offers neither is painful.
He does not blame small companies for missing the target. Carving out tasks suited to a person's disability and assigning staff to support them are easier for large firms, which have more profit and more people to spare. Holding small firms to the same standard is harsh, he wrote.
He also said the quota itself has value. Japan still separates children with disabilities in education, he wrote, and many people have little experience of those with disabilities, which makes the idea of working alongside them hard to picture. Setting a standard guarantees a measure of hiring.
Matching, not counting
Ototake pointed to cases where a disability became an asset. At one manufacturer, a worker who is sensitive to sound noticed an abnormal noise during machining and stopped defective products from shipping, and was recognized for it. People with developmental disabilities are also known to excel at thoroughly hunting down software bugs.
Not every disability can be turned into a strength, he wrote. The first task is to reduce situations where a disability works against a person, and then to connect what that person does well to the job.
“Disability employment should shift its focus from competing on the numbers at the entrance to how well people have been matched with suitable work.”Hirotada Ototake, author
Ototake was born in Tokyo in 1976. His book “Gotai Fumanzoku” (“No One's Perfect”), written while he was in university, sold more than 6 million copies. He has worked as a sports writer and as an elementary school teacher, and served on the Tokyo Board of Education.