In her recently published essay, Powell River writer and researcher Kathleen O’Neil examines the employment aspirations of persons with disabilities, the multiple values that work provides to them and the barriers to employment that continue to confront them.
Work as a Desired Form of Participation in Community Life, written by O’Neil, has been included in The Value of Work, published by Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford, England in 2012. The book is a compilation of papers delivered by international academics on the subject of the value of work.
Her research was originally presented as the opening paper at the First Global Conference on the Value of Work in Prague, Czech Republic, in November 2010.
O’Neil’s essay explores the ways in which work has the ability “to enhance the economic status, personal identity, social connectivity and independent functioning of persons with disabilities.”
She was initially drawn to the conference focus, because of her work as an occupational analyst, but ultimately she drew inspiration for her paper from her own son’s adamant desire to work and make a contribution to his community. “Seeing his determination, despite his disability, to be a man who has a job, a role,” was what prompted her to look at the situation globally. “I had never studied the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, but it became the point of departure for the paper and deeply changed me as a parent.”
Before studying the convention, O’Neil was preoccupied with keeping her son safe. However, the convention challenged that. “It made me recognize that ‘safe’ isn’t good enough. We can’t throw away the supports for people with disabilities, but we need to accept that disabled people have a right to live a full life—culturally, economically and socially. Employment is a big component in that.”
The enthusiastic reception to her paper at the conference in Prague and the subsequent publishing of her essay in this collection affirm O’Neil’s belief that examining the rights of persons with disabilities can enrich discussion on almost any social issue. “It was significant that the paper was read at an international conference on the value of work, rather than at a specialist conference on disability issues,” said O’Neil. “It goes to the heart of inclusion, of what we want when we speak about inclusion—the recognition that disability issues are central to how we shape our ideas of ourselves as human beings and as a human community.”
