Rehabilitation International – Commission on Work and Employment submitted comments to the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the Committee) for the Draft General Comment on art. 27 of the CRPD, as follows:
Page 6 (18): Within the first sentence after „disabilities “we recommend adding: „segregated from enterprises “. Explanation: The American firm FLEX operating in China (Zhuhai) has established a unit for persons with disabilities inside the enterprise, which is included in the whole workforce (www.flex.com). RI votes for this option respected by the document of the Commission, because this method of enterprise-intern workshop avoids sheltered workshops outside of enterprises.
Page 10 (35). We recommend to The Commission to add a sentence: „Trade unions and other representatives like work councils should include at least one person with disabilities.” Explanation: According to the German labour law these representatives with disabilities are participated in all disability affairs of the workforce including hiring, dismissing or returning-to-work in the context of persons with disabilities.
Page 14 (49) RI misses the progressive message of the commission that reasonable accommodation is merely the second-value option. RI recommends an additional sentence after the first one: „Preventive-oriented incentives of states in foreseen measures of accessibility in enterprises are preferable “. Explanation: The more this priority can be realized, the more persons of disabilities find a job in the first labour market and measures of reasonable accommodations in single cases are obsolete at the end. These findings are going to be published in RI guidelines on accessibility in private enterprises based on an international study for the German Government.
Page 15 (55) RI recommends adding one sentence: „Job -matching mechanism can be strengthened by return-to-work (RTW) managers as consultants’ preferable persons with disabilities, who take the chance to consult firms in re-designing parts of the organization “. Explanation: The above-mentioned RI guidelines provide best practice examples world-wide like www.umv.nl in the Netherlands or www.nidmar.ca in Canada.
Page 22 (82) second sentence direct at the beginning: „Preventive… “. Explanation: Please refer to the recommendation made for page 14 above.
Page 28 k last sentence: RI recommends deleting this sentence. Explanation: The Commission´s document meets so many different state-cultures like in South America where the population is critical to state-run institutions. Effective RTW is based on divers’ activities in the private sector or social security institutions because of their economic benefit of RTW. For them it is more attractive to invest in retaining or finding a job than to compensate unemployed persons with disabilities.
