A leading UK employers’ group is to urge businesses to pay more
attention to disability issues in their corporate responsibility
initiatives.
The Employers Forum for Disability – which
promotes better recruitment, retention and training of disabled people
among its members – will argue in a forthcoming report that many
companies have done little about disability issues, even though they
may have made good progress on other aspects of equal opportunities.
The report, by Simon Zadek and Susan Scott-Parker, will argue that ‘the
core disability business case is no different fundamentally from the
business case which drives the need to develop truly diverse workforces
and which underpins robust corporate social responsibility policies.’
It will call on socially responsible companies to tackle disability
issues with as much determination as they have other areas such as the
environment, human rights and working conditions.
The report
will also suggest that corporate progress on disability has been slow
partly because many of those working within the corporate
responsibility field have limited direct experience of disability.
The Forum, whose members employ 20 per cent of the UK workforce, is
likely to recommend that employers should carry out more disability
awareness and equality training and set up twinning arrangements with
disability organizations to ensure that they have direct knowledge of
disability.
David Grayson, chairman of the National
Disability Council, said there were some examples of enlightened
companies working on disability. B&Q, for example, had introduced
disability awareness training. But he added: ‘I would still put
disability at a relatively early stage in terms of the responsible
business movement. It must be more proactive.’
In a recent
speech to the RSA Ethics Forum, Grayson argued that ‘most of those now
working in the corporate social responsibility field have not come
from, or had direct personal experience of, disability’.
As a consequence, disability was the ‘Cinderella issue for the responsible business movement’.
