Building self-esteem – and more

Nineteen Spokane employers Wednesday opened their offices and shop floors to the abled. Abled despite developmental challenges that obscure their potential.

“This is the most able work force you will ever find,” David Morris says. And he should know.

Morris has built Habitat International Inc. of Chattanooga, Tenn., into a $14 million company that counts Home Depot, Lowe’s and Costco among the buyers of its outdoor carpeting products. His work force, which varies seasonally from 40 to 100, consists mostly of the homeless, former addicts, and others with a litany of conditions from blindness to Down syndrome. Nevertheless, they outwork able-bodied counterparts who lack their desire and pride.

Competitors with “normal” workers who could not keep up now subcontract their work to Habitat.

“All they want is a chance in life,” Morris says. “This is all about character and self-esteem.”

He adds that too many would-be employees come through the door hoping to draw a paycheck, shirk work, and maybe cash out with a workers’ compensation claim from a minor injury.

In 24 years, Morris says, he has filed only four such claims, just one involving a worker with a disability. “These people don’t want to lose a finger,” he says.

Morris, who travels nationally urging employers to hire the disabled, says he had to overcome his own fears before he took the chance. Raised in a family in which prejudice was the worst sin, he says it was a then-sister-in-law with Down syndrome who showed him the pride that comes from doing even simple tasks. At Habitat, he began with eight workers in a state-supported enclave in what was supposed to be just a two-week experiment. But other employees, many Laotian and Cambodian immigrants who at first thought the newcomers scary, had been won over by their desire and their smiles. They told Morris he had to keep them. He did.

Morris says Habitat has long since cut ties with federal, state and private agencies more intent on rules and numbers than people. He dismisses evaluations that say only what a person cannot do. Many of his managers are former job coaches also fed up with restrictions. He does not want to hear the words “no” or “cannot be done.”

One employee with cerebral palsy has not missed a day of work in five years despite a doctor’s recommendation he be put on permanent disability.

Only a few modifications have been made in the company’s plant to accommodate special needs. To ease the transition into the work place, experienced employees mentor newcomers with similar disabilities. Employees may start at minimum wage, but most earn from $7 to $20 an hour.

Yet labor is less than 5 percent the cost of production, compared with up to 30 percent for his competitors. “We’re extremely profitable,” Morris says.

He says a competitor with $2 billion in sales chose to subcontract work with Habitat after an executive toured the unconventional plant — it has its own employee-run radio station — and saw the productivity.

Despite Habitat’s success, Morris says, he has not been able to convince other employers in the Chattanooga area to follow his example. So he was impressed by the willingness of Spokane-area companies and government agencies to participate in Hire Ability Day, which put Bridget Lavender in a classroom, Brian Struthers in a shop, and 28 others with some degree of disability where they could shadow jobs. Struthers, for example, helped clean computers returned to Itronix for maintenance.

Avista Utilities President Scott Morris says the company contracts with ARC of Spokane for 15 employees who save the energy company $500,000 by recycling connectors and other materials, and generate another $250,000 in revenue by sorting out scrap for sale.

That kind of investment recovery, Avista’s term, should appeal to other employers. Unfortunately, they have a deep pool of job candidates to draw from. Seventy percent of disabled adults in Spokane County are unemployed.

Kathy Sacco, program coordinator for the Washington Initiative for Supported Employment, says organizers hope Hire Ability will provide a new way to engage businesses without pressuring owners to hire the disabled.

“If we can get an employer to start to think differently, we’ve accomplished our goal,” she says.