I hold the position of Business Development Executive for IBM
Australia and New Zealand, and I’m a tireless proponent of the business
case for employing people with disability. There are about one billion
people with disabilities worldwide. They are taking part in the work
force at only half the rate of the general population: 17 million extra
Americans; two million extra Britons; and 1.2 million extra Australians
could be working and want to work. If you assign a productivity factor
of $US21,000 for each of them and factor in savings on welfare
payments, you get a net benefit of $US900 billion that’s not flowing
into the US, UK and Australian economies.
I became quadriplegic in a diving accident at the age of 16.
In my roll with IBM I make 50 trips a year in Australia, New Zealand,
Asia and abroad. In addition, I am an active, vocal advocate in the
Australian community for people with disability and travel the country
speaking on behalf of this cause. I say it is the physical challenges
of navigating in a world not designed for a wheelchair that poses most
problems.
Even with the well-developed process I have when I travel, there are
barriers to public transportation and hotel rooms. It is these barriers
that are, in part, standing in the way of integrating people with
disability into the community and the work force. As an advocate of
change, my message is simple and effective: It makes good economic
sense for every country to tap the talents of people with disability.
The compelling reason for doing this is improving the economic bottom
line.
During my career with IBM, accommodations have helped to make me more
productive and my job easier. IBM has offered me fantastic support –
the hardware I need and software like IBM’s voice recognition product,
ViaVoice. IBM supplied my power wheelchair to help me move around the
office quickly and efficiently. The accommodations have always been
made readily without a problem.
I have my own van with hand controls which I can drive in my
wheelchair, and a fully accessible unit in Sydney equipped with home
automation technology which enables me to live independently. I feel
it’s my responsibility to make people I meet feel comfortable with me.
People may not have direct experience with someone who has a
disability. So it’s up to me to put them at ease. I find that usually
doesn’t take long at all.
There’s no one solution to getting people with disability into the work
force. We need to treat disability as a ‘whole of life’ issue. We need
to remove the infrastructure problem areas faced by people with
disability, empower them with hope and the knowledge to deal with their
disability and we need to lift the community’s expectations of them. My
proposal is for three, closely-linked ‘strategic interventions’
involving engaging the business sector in producing products and
services that remove infrastructure barriers, a lifelong learning
approach to empowering people with disability and a community-wide
marketing program to lift community expectations.