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Youth with intellectual disabilities are not being given equitable job opportunities and urgently need support

Youth with intellectual disabilities are not being given equitable job opportunities and urgently need support
Madri Engelbrecht
By Madri Engelbrecht
4 Sep 2024
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Youth with intellectual disabilities are excluded from work opportunities due to the world of work’s ignorance about this group’s abilities. Society generally focuses on what they think someone with a disability cannot do, and not on what the person is able to do.

Persons with disabilities face more and greater barriers than their non-disabled counterparts when they look for a job. In fact, youth with disabilities are one of the most marginalised groups in societies across the world, according to the United Nations (UN) Children’s Fund.

South Africa’s high unemployment rate of 33% increases competition among job seekers to the extreme, and forces persons with disabilities to the very back of the line for opportunities. Youth with disabilities who finish high school and perhaps also have the opportunity to complete tertiary education may find it easier to enter employment than youth with disabilities who have lower levels of education.

The situation is much bleaker for youth with intellectual disabilities in the country because of the lack of secondary and tertiary education that can accommodate their needs and promote their educational attainment. Persons with intellectual disabilities experience barriers to learning due to intellectual impairment, and when impairments are severe, they can affect the person’s ability to physically perform day-to-day activities.

Special education is offered at a limited number of schools for Learners with Special Educational Needs in the country, accessible to only some children with intellectual disabilities who can travel or live near urban centres where these schools are located.

Even when these youth complete Learners with Special Educational Needs schooling, they tend to face an inaccessible job market with exclusionary employment practices and no understanding of their abilities and what they can offer.

On Casual Day (6 September) it is important to point out that there are multiple reasons why youth with intellectual disabilities are excluded from employment opportunities in South Africa and in other parts of the world.

‘Children for life’


One is that employers, and for that matter, society at large, do not think of and understand youth with intellectual disabilities as people who want to, and can, work. Society tends to regard persons with intellectual disabilities as “children for life” who need to be cared for by a social welfare system. 

The majority of persons with disabilities, however, express a desire to be employed as much as everyone else, be it for the benefit of earning a salary, or for being productive on a day-to-day basis, or for other reasons held by almost all workers.

In one of the Cape Mental Health Society’s projects, youth with intellectual disabilities have been exiting protective workshops over the past 24 years to become employed alongside non-disabled people in the open labour market. In most instances, these young people had been working in a workshop environment for years, enjoying protection against open labour market pressures, norms, and stigmatisation.

Still, when the opportunity arose to transition into open labour market jobs, many left the workshop and took up temporary jobs, which became permanent for some. As long as they had the right support to make the transition into gainful, sustainable employment, they were able to become part of everyday society, from which they had been excluded before, in a meaningful way.

Youth with intellectual disabilities are also excluded from work opportunities due to the world of work’s ignorance about this group’s abilities. Society generally focuses on what they think someone with a disability cannot do, and not on what the person is able to do.

At the risk of generalising, persons with intellectual disabilities perform exceptionally in tasks that they have been trained in appropriately, and can work within rigid margins for accuracy, with less aversion to repetitive tasks compared to many people without disabilities.

For example, a young man with an intellectual disability who works at a veterinary practice outshines his non-disabled counterparts in terms of rigour when he stacks the store room, and when he applies the quality principles to mopping the floors of the practice every day.

Outstanding attendance record


Similarly, another young man with intellectual disability works in the distribution centre of a big pharmacy group, effectively sorting and packing hundreds of pharmacy products every day from instructions that are given to him in the form of images, rather than written words. He has an outstanding attendance record at the centre, and after receiving appropriate training and instruction in his job makes fewer mistakes than his non-disabled counterparts who perform the same tasks.

Youth with intellectual disabilities do require appropriate support to transition into employment, though, and often the necessary knowledge and skill to offer such support is lacking. Employers are not familiar with the type of support required to enable and sustain the work performance of youth with intellectual disabilities, and therefore continue to exclude this group from opportunities.

Relevant supports therefore need to be developed that can assist employers with identifying and customising jobs that could accommodate workers with intellectual disabilities, and to assist with the matching of a job seeker with an intellectual disability with a vacancy.

Employers’ knowledge of how to reasonably accommodate a young employee with intellectual disability so that performance and productivity is optimised needs to develop alongside these resources for transition support.

It is through job matching, reasonable accommodation and transition support that a young woman, Mary, who has an intellectual disability, is able to work as a carer for wheelchair users in a residential facility.

South African employment legislation supports and promotes the employment of persons with disabilities in workplaces, not least because this group had previously been disadvantaged and disproportionately excluded from job opportunities.

Employment policies also mandate employers to transform the exclusionary employment practices of the past and propose mechanisms, such as affirmative action and reasonable accommodation, to redress unfair disadvantages experienced by persons with disabilities in relation to work.

Conducive policy frameworks


Together with such conducive policy frameworks, considerations about work not being performed in one specific, normative way may create opportunities for the workforce integration of youth with intellectual disabilities.

Why can one job not be shared between two people who each bring their optimal capacity, while one works in the morning, and one in the afternoon? Or one during the week, and one over the weekend, for example, in a manufacturing environment that involves shift work?

Where someone with an intellectual disability may experience limitations in terms of capacity, an employer can capitalise on the strengths of that person while reaping the benefit of work-related outputs and outcomes. If a young person with an intellectual disability has favourably competed for that job, it makes business sense to appoint them in that job.

A further driver of employment exclusion is South African employers’ lack of understanding of disability as a human rights issue. While governance in our country is guided by international disability policy – for example, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that addresses the human right of equal access to employment and decent work for persons with disabilities (Article 27) – policy implementation continues to fall short at the coalface of employment practices where barriers continue to keep out youth with intellectual disabilities. 

Disability-specific policies


At local levels some progress has been made through the development of disability-specific policies, like the White Paper on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to inform and drive disability inclusion efforts.

However, on a practical level employers continue to misunderstand what young people with intellectual disabilities can do. Consequently, they may not get the necessary help to figure out what this group of youths has to offer or how to capitalise on their abilities as workers.

When greater awareness about the drive, abilities and productivity value of youth with intellectual disabilities is raised, creating a sustainable job match with a young applicant with intellectual disability becomes viable.

Along with the effective transition of such a young person into work, employers should be able to access the kind of support and resources that will promote sustained disability inclusion in their workforce. DM

Dr Madri Engelbrecht is a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Disability and Rehabilitation Studies in the Department of Global Health at Stellenbosch University.

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