22 May 2008

Wood Products Company Throws Open a Door to the Disabled

Michigan firm finds employees with disabilities are good for business

Maryann Murad, who is blind, handles dangerous machinery at a factory that produces doors. (Courtesy A&F Wood Products)

By Burton Bollag
Special Correspondent

Washington -- Maryann Murad works for a small, family-owned company in Michigan that makes wood doors and frames. She operates power saws, drills and other machines. She makes sure orders are complete before they ship out, and she occasionally helps answer phones when the office is shorthanded.

The company, A&F Wood Products Inc., says it is lucky to have her. But Murad, 37, is different from the other employees.

She has been blind since birth.

"I'm very lucky to be working with people who are open-minded and let me try a lot of different things" at the factory, said Murad. She had searched desperately for a full-time job for years until A&F Wood Products hired her four years ago.

Supporters say that, although disabled people are much more integrated into the mainstream of American life than just a few decades ago, doors often still are shut when they come looking for a job. Yet some companies have opened their doors wide to workers with impairments. In many cases, the companies say, the move is not just a good deed; it is good for business, too.

A&F Wood Products is located in Howell, 64 kilometers from Detroit. The company won an award from the U.S. Department of Labor in 2004 for its policies aimed at employing workers with disabilities. Eight of A&F Wood Products' 30 employees have a physical disability or are mentally impaired.

The door company's approach began by chance. In 1997, a social worker brought around a man with cerebral palsy. He did not work out. But the company agreed to try other people with disabilities. The next candidate was a man who was autistic. He seemed to do well, but had trouble with his hand-eye coordination on a press that punches holes in aluminum tracks for sliding doors.

So the company installed a mechanism that helps move the press and automatically stops it at the proper intervals for each new hole. The mechanism cost $5,000. But "we made that up in a year because it made the machine much faster and easier for everyone to use," said Steve Korte, who co-owns the company with his two brothers.

The company has made other accommodations for its disabled workers: It has rebuilt workstations, installed new software to allow its computers to speak information and adjusted work schedules to match public bus hours of operation. In general, said Korte, the changes have cost little and enabled the company to find disabled employees who have turned out to be exceptionally dependable.

Mike Meinke, disabled from a head injury, is among the successful employees at a Michigan door factory. (Courtesy A&F Wood Products)

"These are people who haven't gotten a chance before, and they really want to succeed," said  Korte. Their presence, he adds, "has raised the level of pride and dependability at our shop in general."

Ten years ago, however, when he and his brothers first considered hiring workers with disabilities, they had many doubts. They were not sure such people safely could operate dangerous machines. (The workers they hired can.) The brothers also feared that hiring people receiving government disability payments might trigger government inspections and greater regulation of their operations. (That hasn't happened.)

In fact, the company receives tax benefits for some of the disabled people it has hired.

The Kortes did not find these answers on their own. They have received help from Work Skills Corporation, a Michigan-based nonprofit employment agency specializing in hard-to-place workers. Each time A&F Wood Products agreed to try out a disabled worker, the agency sent a specially trained coach to help the new employee learn the job and to suggest adaptations the company could make to help.

A&F displays a "very rare attitude" in its readiness to accommodate people with various barriers to employment, said Anita Gibson, Work Skills' vice president.  That attitude appears to be spreading gradually, as more companies discover that people with disabilities can make excellent employees.

There are several reasons.

Technological advances -- like better artificial joints and limbs, cochlear implants that help deaf people hear and computer programs that can speak information on a computer screen -- help people overcome their impairments.

Changing economic patterns make disabled people an increasingly attractive potential pool of employees for some companies.

And a series of federal laws banning discrimination has helped the disabled participate more fully in American life.

The breakthrough came with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It guarantees appropriate treatment and bans discrimination on the basis of disability. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 went further. It requires companies to make "reasonable accommodations" to employ people with disabilities. It also requires businesses and public places to remove architectural barriers that hinder disabled people from working, shopping or visiting theaters or museums.

Yet employment discrimination still exists, many experts say, because employers fear that people with disabilities cannot perform jobs well and that accommodating them will be expensive.

A&F Wood Products found that making an extra effort to welcome such employees has been good for business. It was not a lesson the company wanted to share with its competitors. "To be honest," says co-owner Korte, "when we first found this, we didn't want to tell anyone."