Introduction
Work-related disability has a negative effect on both employees and employers. Across Canada, one worker in 15 is injured on the job each year. In Ontario alone 500 lost time injuries occur each day and 70 of these lead to permanent impairment. For the workers and their families, these events cause pain, suffering and anxiety. For employers, these disabilities increase business costs through disability insurance premiums, workers’ compensation premiums and worker replacement costs.
Disability management and appropriate return to work programs make sense from every perspective, and these initiatives are growing in frequency as both employers and employees recognize the benefits. But as they become more prevalent it is critical that these programs are implemented in a way that ensures their success.
In an increasingly changing and competitive workplace, employers increasingly value their human resources, the women and men whose vocation consequences in the profits and outcomes that remain companies and organizations in business (Bruyere, O’Keeffe 1994). Progressive employers as well comprehend their social liability to the communities in which they work to all members of those communities, together with its disabled members. A strong business case exists for the enclosure and equal prospect and treatment of workers with disabilities in all features of a company’s operations.
A person with a disability is somebody who has a physical or mental mutilation that considerably limits one or more foremost life activities, such as caring for oneself, performing physical tasks, walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, learning or working (Hey, Zola, 1995).
Despite increased understanding to physical and mental disabilities, lots of workers find themselves to be fatalities of employment discrimination owing to their disability (Brabham, Thoreson, 1993). The Canadians with Disabilities Act is a federal law which forbids employers from discerning on the basis of a “capable” disability. Employees living by....
