Any of us could incur a disability due to an accident, illness, or aging, and yet we often fail to understand the needs of people with disabilities, which can be many and varied.
A person’s needs could consist of having a ramp to access a building or a traffic light with sound for those with vision problems. Or, their needs might involve having spaces for a wheelchair or reserved seats on public transportation. Let’s imagine for a moment that all books were in braille or that all orders in a cafeteria were made in sign language. Difficult, right?
This is already complicated in everyday life, but it’s even more so in the workplace, where more than 70% of jobs in Peru are informal, with no guarantees or protections for workers. Given this reality, for some years now, the government has been issuing regulations to promote equal opportunities for workers with disabilities. Thus, Peru’s General Law on Persons with Disabilities establishes the obligation for all employers in the private sector with more than 50 workers to hire, as a minimum, a quota of 3% of people with disabilities; the quota is 5% for a public entity.
The provision has nonetheless not been implemented well. The state has primarily limited its role to verifying whether these quotas are met and sanctioning noncompliance.
In this regard, Peru’s Administration of Labor Supervision (“Sunafil”) annually conducts inspections of employers to verify whether they comply with this obligation. However, even the largest, most formal employers that have established labor inclusion programs routinely do not meet the quotas and are fined, which discourages hiring. This is because the administration only verifies whether they meet the quota, without considering whether there are special circumstances or reasons that make hiring difficult in a certain sector. For example, there may be hurdles related to individuals’ geographic, educational, or qualification status that prevent employers from meeting their hiring quotas.
Although the law allows exemptions from this obligation for employers in some cases (that is, allowing them to not be fined for failing to prove they met the quota of 3% or 5%), the truth is that, in practice, it is not possible to comply with the conditions for such exemptions because the state itself has not provided the tools with which to do so. For example, employers must prove that they requested the Ministry of Labor and Employment Promotion (MTPE) to hire people with disabilities, but the MTPE does not have a virtual platform that allows for this procedure to be done quickly and efficiently.
Still, employers should aim to create a culture of effective inclusion. This labor inclusion strategy should be comprehensive and generate a real effort to achieve the employment and promotion of this group of workers.
Eduardo Mercado is an attorney with Vinatea & Toyama, an Ius Laboris member law firm, in Lima, Peru. © 2024 Vinatea & Toyama. All rights reserved. Reposted with permission of Lexology.
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