Wolfgang Zimmerman speaks to Ronan McGreevyabout his commitment to integrating disabled workers back into the workforce
Wolfgang Zimmerman does not care to remember nor can he forget June 24th, 1977. A native of Germany, he had moved to Canada the previous year to be with his Canadian fiancee.
He was just 20 and saving to get married when he started work as a logger with the giant Canadian timber company MacMillan Bloedel working in the forests of Vancouver Island.
An Alder tree (a form of birch) split in half without warning and fell on him. The accident broke his back and left him in a wheelchair. Suddenly, from having a whole working life ahead of him, he was facing permanent disability and, with it, permanent unemployment.
However, luckily for him the company accepted responsibility for the accident and took him on as a management accountant just six months later.
"There was a tremendous amount of guilt on the part of the company. I hadn't been trained properly. I didn't even know that an Alder tree could split in two. I was lucky because the idea of accommodating somebody with a serious injury was a completely unknown concept at the time," he says.
Zimmerman has since spent his life campaigning for the same work opportunities to be given to other people who have been seriously injured as were given to him and he has become a world-renowned campaigner for disabled rights.
He later struggled to work with the aid of a cane and leg braces. After being profiled in a television documentary in the mid-1980s, Zimmerman launched a project, the end result of which was the award-winning documentary Every 12 Seconds - a reference to how often a Canadian worker is injured in an occupational accident.
He subsequently launched the Disabled Forestry Workers Foundation of Canada and is now the director of the National Institute of Disability Management and Research (NIDMAR) which is committed to integrating disabled workers back into the workforce.
He will be one of the key note speakers in Croke Park at Ibec's inaugural Health and Safety conference at Croke Park tomorrow.
Zimmerman says that despite the UN charter on disability rights and a greater awareness and acceptance of disability across the developed world, the numbers of long-term unemployed people who have become disabled as a result of an accident is "staggeringly high".
In British Columbia, for instance, a province with a population almost exactly the same as this country, he points out that 56 per cent of such people are unemployed. In Ireland, a Central Statistics Office report three years ago found that just 37 per cent of people with a disability or a serious illness were in employment. The equivalent for able-bodied people was almost 70 per cent.
A recent European return-to-work survey carried out by the Work Research Centre and UCD found that half of all Irish people who had a serious illness, including disabilities, were not back at work six months later. In contrast, almost 80 per cent of Dutch workers in similar circumstances went back to work. Only about 15 per cent of the people reported that they got help returning to work in Ireland.
Zimmerman believes there is a growing awareness now that disregarding people because they have acquired a disability is not only morally wrong, but makes no economic sense.
"I will be telling the conference that it is essential to focus on the ability and not the disability," he says. "As a society and as an economy, we can't afford to waste the potential of these people. Why would you turn a potential win, win, win situation into a lose, lose, lose one for the individual, the employer and society."
He believes the costs involved in retraining somebody else, losing the skills that an individual has built up and the staggering cost of welfare payments over a lifetime are all compelling reasons for reintegrating disabled people back into the workforce.
He estimates that a 35-year-old worker on the equivalent of €35,000 a year would cost at least €700,000 in lost wages and social assistance over his lifetime.
Zimmerman has been instrumental in developing a disability management policy when MacMillan Bloedel was taken over by the American giant Weyerhaeuser in 1999.
Because of its extensive forestry work, it would have a relatively high number of employees who get seriously injured on the job and seeks to accommodate all of them. Each work site has an assigned return-to-work co-ordinator who is responsible for making early contact with the affected employees, their families, doctors and their managers to adopt a back-to-work programme.
"We did this for essentially selfish reasons from an employers' perspective. We don't discriminate because of causation. We don't discriminate if somebody was injured in a work-related accident or in a car accident, for instance. We saved CA$10 million [ €7.5 million] in the first year in our disability insurance premiums," he says.
Zimmerman says it often only takes an imaginative approach on the part of employers to accommodate former employees who have become disabled. Voice-activated software can now compensate for office employees who lose the use of their hands while drivers can now be retrained using hand controls.
He says the Canadian government is to the forefront of pioneering a disability management return-to-work programme for all its 189,000 federal employees. The initiative is being spearheaded by Wayne Wouters, a deputy minister in the Canadian government, whose driver became a paraplegic following an accident eight years ago.
Zimmerman believes such an initiative should be tried here. "It is worth asking the question what the Irish Government is doing for its employees who become disabled.
"Do they say that the Government values their knowledge and expertise and are making a cost competitive decision to retain that person rather than training someone else?" he asks.