Sickness, Disability and Work: Breaking the Barriers: A Synthesis of Findings across OECD Countries (PDF)
Too many workers leave the labour market permanently due to health problems or disability, and too few people with reduced work capacity manage to remain in employment. This is a social and economic tragedy common to virtually all OECD countries. It also...
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Too many workers leave the labour market permanently due to health problems or disability, and too few people with reduced work capacity manage to remain in employment. This is a social and economic tragedy common to virtually all OECD countries. It also raises an apparent paradox that needs explaining: Why is it that the average health status is improving, yet large numbers of people of working age are leaving the workforce to rely on long-term sickness and disability benefits?,
This report, the last in the OECD series Sickness, Disability and Work: Breaking the Barriers, synthesises the project’s findings and explores the possible factors behind the paradox described above. It highlights the roles of institutions and policies and concludes that higher expectations and better incentives for the main actors – workers, employers, doctors, public agencies and service providers – are crucial. Based on a review of good and bad practices across OECD countries, this report suggests a series of major reforms are needed to promote employment of people with health problems.
The report examines a number of critical policy choices between: tightening inflows and raising outflows from disability benefit, and promoting job retention and new hiring of people with health problems. It questions the need for distinguishing unemployment and disability as two distinct contingencies, emphasises the need for a better evidence base, and underlines the challenges for policy implementation.
Sickness and disability outcomes are still disappointing in most countries, with low employment rates and high benefit dependence, calling for further often unpopular reforms. In the past 10-15 years, countries have started to shift their approach away from merely paying benefits to people with disability towards helping them stay in, or return to, work. This chapter outlines the main directions of recent reforms across the OECD and explores the question whether or not changes have gone far enough to reduce benefit dependency and increase employment rates. The chapter concludes that i) policy matters: reform has had a major impact on the observed outcomes, especially the disability beneficiary rate; and ii) policies are moving in the right direction, with considerable convergence of policies despite continued structural differences. However, in most countries more needs
In 2003, the OECD report Transforming Disability into Ability concluded that sickness and disability policy was in dire need of comprehensive reform, probably more than any other area of social and labour market policy. To a considerable extent this conclusion still holds today, with countries struggling to overcome the high disability beneficiary rates. This does not mean, however, that nothing has changed in the past decade. On the contrary, policy measures aimed at reaching a new balance between income security and labour market integration for people with disability have started in most OECD countries.
More specifically, the focus of disability policy in many cases has recently shifted from a passive towards a more employment-orientated approach. This chapter begins by outlining recent trends in reforms of sickness and disability policy to improve labour market inclusion for people with disability. It then explores the extent to which these reforms have sufficed to change the overall policy
3.1. Key reform trends across the OECD
There have been many changes in policies aimed at improving employment chances for people with disability and making work a more attractive option for this group of the population. These reforms can be classified under three main broad trends, as described in the following and discussed in more detail in Chapters 4-6: an expansion of employment integration measures; an improvement of the institutional set up; and a tightening of benefit schemes.
Expanding integration policy
One development in disability policy, observed in virtually all OECD countries over the past two decades, is a gradual expansion of policy and measures aimed at helping people stay in and/or re-enter the labour market. These policies can take different forms and often include a combination of measures aimed at supporting workers and employers, coupled with stronger responsibilities for companies.
Anti-discrimination legislation
Most countries have introduced anti-discrimination legislation to ensure equal treatment of people with disability (and other disadvantage) in job promotion, hiring and dismissal procedures. Among the first to establish such legislation were Canada in 1985 through the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the United States with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (effective 1992). In many European countries, a ban on discrimination on the basis of disability was implemented more recently as part of the EU obligation to adopt similar legislation. In some countries, legislation was first introduced softly and then strengthened gradually in terms of scope and eligibility. In the United
- 2010, 169 Seiten, Englisch
- Herausgegeben: OECD Publishing (Ed.)
- Verlag: OECD Paris
- ISBN-10: 9264088857
- ISBN-13: 9789264088856
- Erscheinungsdatum: 01.01.2010
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