November 28, 2016.
From November 14 to 20, the Disabled People’s Employment Week was held. An opportunity to take stock of the situation of disabled workers and the obstacles they encounter.
More and more disabled job seekers
At the end of June, 480,000 disabled jobseekers were registered with Pôle Emploi. They represent 8.6% of all job seekers, according to the Association for the Management of the Fund for the Professional Integration of People with Disabilities (Agefiph). But what is even more concerning is that this number of job seekers increased by 2.3% compared to June 2015.
The number of unemployed disabled workers increased by 41% between 2012 and 2016. This figure should not hide another reality: the number of disabled workers increased by 700,000 between 2011 and 2015. Therefore, it is natural that the number of disabled job seekers increases. They are more likely to look for a job and therefore to face the difficulty of the labor market.
The main obstacles for disabled job seekers
But what prevents a disabled worker from finding work? First obstacle: access to training. But that’s not all. Prejudice is a real obstacle for workers with disabilities. Employers, for example, often associate disability with a wheelchair, while only 0.6% of the French population is in a wheelchair..
We tend to forget it, but a disabled worker can only suffer from dyslexia, diabetes, hypertension, deafness in one ear, or low back pain. Of the 12 million people with disabilities in France, 80% have an invisible disability.
” There are more or less benevolent companies: around 10% don’t want to hear about disability », Explains Valérie Oudinot, consultant for Pidiem, a disability consulting company, in the columns of 20 minutes. ” We risk waiting another twenty years to achieve real integration. “
