Disabled Workers Hit Paydirt at Unistar Opto

"Hey, it'll take you forever if you just package the LED drivers one at a time. It would be faster if you lined them up three in a row, don't you think?"

"This is how you told me to do it," retorts Gao Zhesheng.

"Why are you putting them so close together? Space them farther apart!"

In his 20s and standing just 125 centimeters tall, the roly-poly Gao Zhesheng can only reach halfway across the work counter, then when he climbs up on a chair for better access, his feet no longer reach the floor. But such problems don't affect his deft control of the heat packaging machine to which he has been assigned.

Hong Yajing has a rather sharp tongue. Like Gao, however, she is a dwarf, and her tongue-lashings are not mean-spirited: "We're both in the same boat, after all."

Gao gets along extremely well with people at Unistar Opto, and has had a much better experience there than at other workplaces in the past. The employer for whom he previously managed to stay on longest was a gasoline station, where he worked as a janitor. "I don't know why, but my boss would always call me over just before the end of my shift and tell me I had to clean up some especially oil-stained part of the floor all by myself before I could get off work." He also worked at a convenience store once, but was fired after just two months without any advance warning.

Now he's very happy at Unistar Opto: "I've never had a boss who was so concerned about disabled employees!"

Gao Zhesheng in the past has always had to scrape by as best he could, bumping along from one odd job to the next, including appearances in a number of music videos. He cherishes his current job, and dreams of being cast for a part in a TV drama.

Asked about his decision to hire so many disabled employees all at once, company chairman Lin Chin-lung simply says, "We had some openings."

Lin got his start in the cement industry, where he made his first pot of gold before branching out two years ago into LED light source packaging. Prior to the big hire in July, his company had 60-plus employees, and had invested in an upstream packaging firm. Export markets were steadily growing. After Unistar Opto entered into a deal with a major Japanese manufacturer this past May, the company suddenly found itself significantly understaffed.

When Lin contacted the Taipei City Department of Labor for referrals, the latter suggested that he hire people with disabilities.

Says Lin: "The only things I consider when hiring are attitude and ability, so I accepted the suggestion without the slightest hesitation."

As Jian Mingshan of the Taipei City Department of Labor's Disabled Employment Division explains, the department had carefully assessed the situation at Unistar Opto before making the suggestion, and decided to push for the hire for three reasons. First, the minimum skill requirements did not present a prohibitively high barrier for such jobs as soldering, assembly, or packaging, all of which can be broken down into relatively simple subtasks. The only positions requiring high-level specialized skills were in R&D.

Second, the switch to LED lighting is a worldwide trend, so business prospects for Unistar Opto look quite good, and LED lighting falls within the field of green energy, which the government has targeted for high-priority development.

And third, the company's strong willingness to hire disabled employees was quite unusual. It wasn't even subject to the statutory hiring requirement (since it then had fewer than 67 employees), yet was planning to offer its disabled employees the exact same pay and benefits as those of ordinary new hires (NT$20,000 monthly salary; NT$1,000 monthly bonus for employees with perfect attendance; and lunches provided by the company), and was going to take people no matter what type of disability they had.

Says Jian: "No company has ever hired that many disabled people all at once. If we can make a success of this, it will set an excellent precedent that we can use to promote further hiring of this sort."

Unistar Opto had only been planning to hire 10 or 15 people, but when the Department of Labor proposed 25 candidates, the company hired them all (in addition to the 25, there were another four persons who had previously been hired for positions in inventory management and janitorial services). Included among them were people with mental illnesses, intellectual disabilities, limited motor ability, hearing and speech impairments, and autism. The symptoms ranged from mild to severe.

Anson Lian, a department manager at Unistar Opto, explains that job candidates were asked to try their hand at various workplace tasks, but "it takes time to observe a person's aptitudes, so if you insist on winnowing out candidates after a short little test, your choices will very likely be based on personal appearance, which is neither sensible nor fair." Lian therefore suggested to Chairman Lin that he hire the entire lot. Since the company foresaw further need for new employees in the future, the suggestion was adopted on the spot.

The encouragement that co-workers give each other creates a feeling of security that is in the interest of everyone, including both employees and management.

"With the company being so accommodating," confides Ivan Hsu, an assistant supervisor in the Disabled Employment Division, "the department really put big pressure on us to make absolutely sure this hire would work out well." Ten days before the new employees were set to begin their new jobs, recalls Hsu, the Department of Labor dispatched 10 employment support specialists to prepare the rookies for their new jobs through one-on-one coaching. Hsu personally oversaw the process all day long for an entire month in order to understand each person's situation, arrange appropriate work, and make sure they would quickly learn the ropes.

"You can't assume that people with disabilities are less able workers. Lots of times we find that they concentrate much better and perform more steadily than an ordinary employee!"

One mentally ill person, for example, became fixated with loosening and tightening screws repeatedly if he had a screwdriver at hand, and thus couldn't be assigned to do assembly tasks. But when it came to putting boxes together and tagging them with all sorts of different labels, he was an absolute wizard, placing the labels with amazing precision. Now there are two different production lines fighting for his services.

Those with autism, in the meantime, may have inflexible personalities and communicate poorly with others, "but on the positive side," says Hsu, "once they get the hang of something, they show far better concentration and dedication than anyone else."

In addition, the Taipei Department of Labor has helped the company to apply for special ergonomically designed chairs so that physically disabled employees can sit for extended periods without experiencing numbness. Three employees with dwarfism will be getting chairs that elevate and descend to meet their particular needs. "Having the right implements greatly reduces the impact of physical imperfections on a person's work performance."

Everyone gathers round at lunch hour to chat or watch TV. This is the most fun and relaxing part of the day.

Each person in this group has been through all sorts of hardship.

Forty-two-year-old Xing Weizhong, for example, began experiencing neural atrophy after graduating from a vocational high school. After his legs atrophied, a cane became necessary for walking. But this didn't affect his ability, in a previous job, to assemble and repair phone handsets. Nevertheless, he suddenly found himself out of a job when his employer shifted production offshore. From that point forward, he never again found stable employment, and had to rely on welfare payments to eke by. Physical rehabilitation was out of the question, and an auto accident several years ago made matters even worse. Today, he totters along at snail's pace with a cane.

He had the rare good fortune last year of getting hired at a hypermart to do repair work, but after a month and a half on the job the boss fired him, saying that "an employee must be able to repair a USB drive in three minutes or less."

Says Hsu: "People like Xing aren't going to get hired anywhere. They're totally shut out of the job market, so when an opportunity like this comes along, they're going to do everything they can to make a success of it."

These days, Xing is up and dressed in time to leave home in Muzha at 5 a.m. each morning. It's a slow 30-minute walk to the bus stop, followed by a bus ride and transfer to Taipei's metro system and a trip halfway across Taipei for a 7 a.m. arrival at Donghu Station in Neihu where, but for the help of station personnel, he might very well be unable to fight his way through the crowds of students to get off the train to find a co-worker waiting in his car to give Xing a ride to work.

Hsu has helped countless people in challenged circumstances to deal with job searches, and has found that the confidence of those with physical disabilities is easily shaken. The problem is not usually a lack of ability, but rather a lack of advance preparation, or perhaps a need to adjust one's attitude toward work.

"People with physical disabilities are usually rather isolated in the workplace, and often have bosses who are unable to see things from their perspective. However, one's work attitude is an area where instruction is absolutely necessary; otherwise, when a company's compassion runs dry, what is a person to do?"

Hsu points to the company-provided lunches at Unistar Opto as an example. The meals are varied, and the helpings are big, which those with physical disabilities really appreciate. "However, they generally lack experience in group situations. Having led tough lives that seldom afforded the opportunity to eat so well, a lot of them reacted with an unseemly eagerness to grab lots of food. Then they overstuffed themselves, which affected their energy level on the job."

To change their behavior, Hsu required all the disabled employees to eat together as a group for their first month on the job, and to wait for the entire group to be seated before starting their meals. "I was treating them a bit like children, but that's what had to be done to acclimatize them to group living."

After a month had gone by, everyone was allowed to sit wherever they wanted to at lunch, and the atmosphere gradually changed. "After the other employees noticed that the disabled workers were eating properly and showing good manners, they even began to help their disabled co-workers to fill their plates and wash the dishes afterward!"

Ever the "full-service" manager, Hsu has even helped some of his charges deal with credit-card debt. "As soon as our people were hired, the banks started sending dunning notices to the company. I contacted the banks and asked if they could lower the payments a bit. I explained to them that they'd have to leave the employees with enough money to get by on, because if they pushed too hard and triggered some crisis that caused them to lose their jobs, then they wouldn't be able to get anything out of them at all."

Unistar Opto also deals well with the mentally ill, who otherwise meet with cold shoulders and tend to be emotionally unstable. As manager Anson Lian explains: "We all have sensitivities that we don't want disturbed. A manager's job is to understand where everyone's weak spots are and make sure their hot buttons don't get pushed. I tell our mentally ill employees to let their team leader know whenever some task is more than they can handle, because we'll switch them to doing something else."

After spending a month and a half breaking in the new employees, Chairman Lin is very happy with their performance. Moreover, Unistar Opto has recently begun on remodeling work to provide better disabled access in and around its factory. Changes include wheelchair ramps and automatic doors. Chairman Lin has indicated that if production lines are expanded in the future, he will certainly consider hiring more people with disabilities, and if they perform well they will have the opportunity to get promoted. There is no reason why they should necessarily remain in low-level positions indefinitely.

But the responsibility of ensuring a fair shake in the work world for persons with disabilities cannot fall exclusively on one single company. If ordinary people would all do away with the labels they affix to the disabled, and try to better understand and care about them, persons with disabilities would fare much better on the job.