with severe disabilities, fulfillment of projects promoting the employment of people with severe disabilities, and establishment of a center for supporting the employment of people with disabilities; and
-vocational rehabilitation measures: research and study, securing professional personnel, and support projects and job site practices for the development of jobs in cooperation with the private sector.
In May, 1995, the Management and Coordination Agency sent a "Recommendation Based on the Results of Administrative Inspection of the Hiring and Employment of People with Disabilities" to the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Education. This report recommended consideration and implementation of the following:
-setting employment quotas for people with intellectual disabilities;
-expansion of the businesses subject to the levy (currently, employers who do not have more than 300 full-time employees are not included);
-fulfillment of employment measures for people with disabilities;
-reconsideration of the range of severe disabilities; and
-expansion of the qualifications required of people with disabilities for entrance into schools for the development of vocational skills.Some of these have been long-standing problems among those concerned with these issues.
in April, 1996, responding to this report, the Ministry of Labor established a Study Group on the Problems of the Employment of People with Disabilities. This study group consisted of people involved in organizations for people with disabilities and others with relevant expertise and experience. They began to discuss issues relating to an extension of the application of employment quotas to include people with intellectual disabilities, such as the appropriateness of the employment quota, the value of the quota, and so on). We are continuously watching with hope the conclusions of this group and the discussions in the Council on the Employment of People with Physical Disabilities.
The theme of this year's White Paper is "a new view of disabilities". First, I would like to discuss this from the viewpoint of the employment of people with intellectual disabilities. In the relationship between intellectual disability and employment, there had been a view that did not respect work for people with disabilities. But one aspect of the normalization principle is that life models should not be different depending on whether or not a person has a disability. So it is natural that people should work when they become adults and want to work. Additionally, working is important because it forms the basis of economic and mental independence, participation in and acceptance by society, utilization of one's abilities, self-realization, and so forth.
Emphasizing working based on the new view of disability may be the origin of the changes in recent years that include amendment of the law in 19B7 to provide that people with intellectual disabilities should be included formally in the employment plans of the Labor Ministry, and that included people with intellectual disabilities in the employment quotas, as well as the various changes described above having to do with the obligation to employ people with intellectual disabilities.
Also, some vestiges remain of the old view of disability in how we think about vocational competence.For example, we are apt to think that if a person has an intellectual disability, the person has low competence vocationally. But the competence and skills required for a job do not always correspond to the conditions in which intellectual disability is diagnosed against some absolute standard of performance.Rather, what is important for employment is relative -- whether the person can fit into a particular job and a particular job environment.
It has been generally recognized that successful employment of a person with an intellectual disability depends strongly on the environmental factors of the job, the company, and the economy, including the type and grade of the task demands, accommodations made in the work process, improvements in machines and other equipment, the policies and practices of management, and the labor market.
In this sense, the fact that the Plan for People with Disabilities did not attribute the job problem only to individual abilities, but rather dealt with it as a social problem that could be ameliorated by the employment quota or the fostering of third-sector enterprises hiring people with severe disabilities, and that the Management and Coordination Agency recommended the promotion of measures for the support of employment through evaluating the severity of each person's disability according to the person's work
