The Role of Shared Resilience in Building Employment Pathways with People with a Disability
How is the pathway to open employment carved out with people who have a disability?
This research aims to understand how Australian Disability Enterprises and Work Integration Social Enterprise (WISE) support people with a disability into mainstream employment.
For workers living with a disability, pathways to sustainable employment in the open labour market are inhibited by barriers that operate at different structural and societal levels. The culture of Australia’s government employment services has applied a ‘work-first’ approach that emphasises finding people employment rather than supporting the acquisition of skills and education.
The net effect of this approach is the preferencing of short-term employment solutions, with a focus on individual behaviour or so-called resilience, and an emphasis on personal responsibility instead of addressing structural issues.
In this paper, researchers from CSI Swinburne explore how people with disability can be supported in finding employment through a shared resilience approach offered by a Work Integration Social Enterprise (WISE).
The research found that:
- Social enterprises, employers, and service providers share in the responsibility carried by individuals to carve out an employment pathway in an increasingly complex and uncertain labour market shaped by ableism, stigma, funding barriers, and time-assessed productivity measures.
- Building networks and sustained support into the values that drive employment practices is a way of challenging norms that marginalise and exclude.
We suggest that WISEs can provide the conditions for shared resilience by developing and sustaining networks needed to generate hybrid pathways to work and by role modelling inclusive work conditions in the open labour market.
Graphic abstract
What is shared resilience?
Shared resilience recognises that individuals should not bear the full weight of entry into the labour market. Instead of expecting individuals to be responsible for solving broader social problems, such as the historical exclusion of many people with a disability from the labour market, the concept of shared resilience suggests that organisations, such as employers and WISEs, play a role in creating the conditions for resilience.
Shared resilience is the dynamic process through which resilience is created by individuals and organisations working together to overcome disadvantages.
