How can downsizing organizations strategically create jobs for disabled people?

Abstract

Countries implement Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP) to help employ disabled people, preferably in regular employment. So far, many employers still have not been successful in creating jobs for people with reduced work capacity. An often mentioned reason by employers is that given the current hard economic times, many organizations engage in reducing the number of jobs instead of creating new jobs. There is a tension between desired social policy outcomes (getting people out of social security into regular jobs) and preferred Strategic HRM outcomes (such as being a highly productive, cost-efficient and flexible organization). In this paper we combine insights from Social Policy and Strategic HRM literature to investigate what employer behavior determines the successfulness of ALMP. We investigate this in a special setting: downsizing organizations. We argue that downsizing organizations who do succeed in employing disabled people reflect a true climate of inclusion. We gathered data among eleven downsizing organizations in the financial industry and five public downsizing organizations. Furthermore, the researchers interviewed three experts on this topic. Although all organizations would like to comply with the ALMP, we found some distinctive features of the HR activities of successful versus unsuccessful organizations.