Rights and opportunities, the challenge from employment placement to the Life Project

by Domenico Sabia

Coordinator of the 'Employment Inclusion' group of the National Observatory on the Condition of Persons with Disabilities

The new Action Plan of the National Observatory aims to strengthen the right to work of persons with disabilities through personalised tools.

The National Observatory on the Condition of Persons with Disabilities developed five themes relating to five areas that are fundamental aspects of the lives of persons with disabilities.

Accessibility, health and wellbeing, employment inclusion, school inclusion and the Life Project were the themes around which five working groups carried out study, analysis and policy development activities.

The relevant ministries, regions, local authorities, Third Sector organisations, representative federations of persons with disabilities and trade unions discussed these issues, developing policy guidelines that were translated into lines of action and ultimately into the Three-Year Action Plan. The Plan has now completed its approval process and has become a knowledge base for future initiatives by Parliament, the Government, ministries and public bodies more generally.

The third line of action in the Plan addressed employment inclusion through ten areas of intervention:

1. reform of targeted employment placement;

2. strengthening territorial plans and enhancing the role of social enterprises and cooperatives;

3. strengthening measures that ensure continuity between school inclusion and employment inclusion;

4. protection of the rights and personhood of workers with disabilities;

5. reasonable accommodation;

6. workplace safety;

7. development of self-employment and entrepreneurship;

8. reform of the social security system for workers with disabilities;

9. development of a culture of employment for persons with disabilities;

10. strengthening corporate welfare.

For persons with disabilities, employment was the first form of protection requested from the State. It was in 1968, with Act No. 482, that Italian law introduced legislation aimed at strengthening access to employment by protecting entry into the labour market through reserved quotas for protected categories who were unemployed and without income support.

This marked the birth of 'mandatory employment placement', even before the legal system introduced welfare-based financial benefits through Act No. 118 of 1971, designed to replace or supplement an income that was non-existent or insufficient to guarantee a free and dignified life.

This form of protection was initially limited to the establishment of the employment relationship, while workers with disabilities remained subject to the same rules and protections as all other workers once employed.

Greater attention to the worker with a disability and to their skills shifted the focus away from limitations and towards potential, as well as towards the need to identify the most suitable placement in which that potential could be developed.

Act No. 68 of 1999 introduced the system of 'targeted employment placement', based on the principle of 'the right person in the right job'.

Act No. 68 of 1999 defines targeted employment placement as the set of services designed to facilitate the employment and workplace integration of persons with disabilities.

Protection for workers with disabilities was further strengthened with Italy's implementation of the United Nations Convention.

This is a composite set of measures reflected in the Plan's third line of action on employment inclusion, which develops these concepts and provides lawmakers with concrete proposals for immediate and direct protective measures.

With the disability reform introduced by Legislative Decree No. 62 of 2024, the right to work became an integral part of the Life Project freely chosen by the person with a disability.

It is a personalised pathway built together with the person and their family, taking account of wishes, inclinations, potential and specific needs. It is a plan that encompasses education, employment, housing, social life, health and leisure.

The basis for developing the Life Project and promoting the employment inclusion of a person with a disability is an examination of their functional profile through a biopsychosocial assessment that takes into account their health condition, their lived experience of that condition and the social contexts in which they live and develop their personality.

Italy's legal system has strengthened a tool capable of adapting work organisation to the needs of a person with a disability, enabling them to make the fullest possible use of their skills and work capacity.

That tool is reasonable accommodation, which makes it possible to connect a person's work capacity with the organisation of production.

This begins with measures aimed at ensuring an inclusive and safe working environment.

In this sense, remote working and part-time work can become tools that make employment feasible for the worker and useful for the economic organisation in which they carry out their activity.

Reasonable accommodation has brought about a cultural change in industrial relations. The power to organise work is no longer held solely by the employer, as under the traditional legal conception. Workers with disabilities are also called upon to contribute to its exercise and, through their representative organisations, to participate in creating rules capable of shaping a working environment that protects the person and gives concrete expression to the 'social function' of property and the means of production, a principle firmly rooted in the Italian Constitution.