Would you be willing to drive a few extra minutes to give your business to a retail, service or food and beverage establishment that you knew had inclusive hiring practices for persons with disabilities? If your answer is yes, you’ll want to continue reading on to find out about a new app that will make it much easier for you to find such a retailer and/or service company in your area. This app also allows you to nominate other businesses who are demonstrating this practice so that they too may be recognized and rewarded for demonstrating equality and inclusivity in the workplace.
How did I find out about this?
I had the pleasure of being invited to the annual Gateway Association Mayor luncheon in Edmonton, Alberta earlier this year to hear the benefits of inclusion in the workplace as it relates to the hiring of persons with disabilities.
Sitting at a table with the Mayors of Edmonton and St. Albert, Alberta (Don Iveson and Nolan Crouse), I listened to Mark Wafer speak about his own experience in this area. Mark is a national disability advocate and champion of inclusive employment in Canada. He is the owner of six Tim Hortons franchises in Toronto and has hired over 107 persons with disabilities over the past 20 years. As of May 2015, he had 46 persons with disabilities on his payroll out of a total workforce of 250.
This represents close to 20% of his workforce!
In his speech Mark spoke of the many benefits of employing persons with disabilities, one of which was the fact he’d had a zero absenteeism rate among his employees with a disability in 2011. He also shared with us that the average tenure of a person with a disability is 7 years in comparison to just over 1 year for all other employees in his franchises.
Mark credits inclusive hiring practices for the economic success of all of businesses.
This luncheon was organized by Gateway Association. Gateway Association is a holistic non-profit organization that provides support to people with disabilities and their families. They do this through offering family support, mentorship, education and awareness in addition to forming solid relationships between employers and persons with disabilities that allows for their gainful employment so they may be contributing members to society.
Gateway Association recently released the We Belong app (free on iTunes) that allows you the ability to search for businesses in your area that are known for their inclusive hiring practices and with this app you can filter the search by location, category or name. Given this is a fairly new app, you may find that your search produces limited results or in some cases, none. If so, you can help in expanding the list by nominating establishments in your area that meet the criteria. This applies to businesses in both Canada and the United States.
The bottom line here is that hiring a person with a disability is good for business.
The facts speak for themselves:
– A 2008 COMPAS Research poll found 78% of Canadians say they are more likely to buy a product or service from a business that has a policy of hiring people with disabilities than from a company that doesn’t.
– Businesses that hire inclusively also attract the support of families and people touched by disability and in Alberta this is a a $41-billion market.
– Adults with disabilities make up about 16% (Statistics Canada, PALS 2006) of Alberta’s population of 3.6 million (2011 Census).
– The average Alberta household spends $71,429 annually on goods and other services (Statistics Canada, 2013) with the average household size in Alberta being 2.6 persons (2011 Census).
This means persons with disabilities, as consumers, represent $15.8 billion of the market in Alberta. When you factor in friends and family who also spend to support diversity in business, this number is closer to $41 billion. And this number has grown in the last 3 years with the the current total population of Alberta currently now being just over 4 million.
And the above statistics are just a tip of the iceberg on the benefits of hiring persons with a disability.
More information, along with the debunking of many myths that exist in both the Canada and United States labor market when it comes to hiring persons with disabilities, can be found in a article titled Rethinking Disability in the Private Sector. This paper was the result of 200 interviews with employers across the country by the Government of Canada’s Panel on Labor Market Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities in 2012 and it captures information that is relevant in both the Canada and the United States labor markets.
The bottom line in all of the research is that it makes business sense to hire persons with disabilities.
Being a person with a disability, I feel a tremendous amount of optimism and pride in the work Gateway Association has done in this area that contributes to employers clearly being able to see the ABILITY in disability in recognizing the true value of attracting and retaining persons with disabilities.
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