- 23.
Sheltered employment plays important role
Sheltered employment plays a very important role in enabling persons with disability to integrate into the community and share equal chances with others, said the Director of Social Welfare, Mr lan Strachan.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Society of Homes for the Handicapped - Leung King Adult Training Centre today (Thursday), Mr Strachan said the White Paper on Rehabilitation published in May also aimed to provide equal opportunities and full participation for people with a disability and to provide a better tomorrow for all.
"With our changing economic structure in recent years some sheltered workshops have been unable to secure sufficient job orders from the traditional manufacturing type of business," Mr Strachan said.
He said a working party was therefore set up in May 1994 to review the training and employment of people with disabilities.
"During the review we have conducted a survey on the profile of 4,180 workers in 40 sheltered workshops and found out that the earnings of most sheltered workers were low.
"Only 2.3 per cent earned more than $1,000 a month and about 23 per cent could move on to open or supported employment but about seven per cent were considered not suitable for sheltered work because of advanced age, deterioration in health or work ability," he added.
Based on these findings and other observations and statistics, Mr Strachan said that a report by the working party recommended that future sheltered workshops could have four components including training, production, upward movement pre-discharge and integrated work extension for older, less productive workers.
"It was also emphasised that an adequate monitoring system should be introduced to focus on output performance indicators," Mr Strachan added.
At the moment, members of the public were being consulted on the recommendations and the views of those concerned about sheltered employment were most valuable, he said.
End/Thursday, November 16, 1995