Social enterprise Will & Able wants to create 100 jobs for disabled New Zealanders. Three employees share what the chance to work means to them.
Inside a factory in the South Auckland suburb of Papatoetoe, there is dignity in working. People clad in hi-vis gear chat to their friends as they fill products with eco-friendly cleaning solutions, strike up some banter as they stick yellow labels on containers and bottles made from 100% recycled milk bottles, and tell jokes as they fulfil online orders. The small team of 10 disabled employees, together with their supervisors and managers, are proud of what they do at Will & Able.
Since 2019, the social enterprise has been providing employment, paid at minimum wage, to disabled New Zealanders. You might have noticed their sustainable dishwashing liquid, laundry detergent, toilet cleaner and other household products on Countdown and New World shelves, at The Warehouse, or, if you work at Auckland Council, in its offices, kitchens and cafeterias. Will & Able also encourages customers to return their empties directly or by dropping them off at one of insurance broker Aon’s 70 branches nationwide. The returned product is cleaned, refilled and reused.
People who work at Will & Able might otherwise be unemployed and dependent on benefits. One of its employees, William Paddick, likes knowing he’s earning valuable work experience from his first job. The 19-year-old aspiring diesel mechanic, putting together online orders as I speak with him, says it’s hard for people like him to find a job. “It’s good to have something that gives you a chance. There are not many employers who do.”
Standing next to a pallet of stacked boxes, Boris Sequeira tells me he goes home feeling proud of his efforts, filling his mum in on everything about his day: “the fun we had, the different experiences of what we have done.” Sequeira is perfectly happy where he is: “I got the job after quite a long job hunt,” he says. “I had a couple of jobs … where I was not myself, so I really like being here. I really want to do my best.”
Marcel Coe, Will & Able’s first ever employee, loves his job. “We all get a chance, and not only that, we get the chance to give our people a chance too,” he says. One of his friends, who lives with Parkinson’s disease, the same brain disorder that world heavyweight champion boxer Muhammad Ali lived with, didn’t know about Will & Able when Coe informed her. “You know what she said to me?” he says, as his eyes start to well up. “‘This [job] gives me a chance at life. There’s almost no other job that would give a chance to me, the way I am, but here’.”
Over one million New Zealanders identify as disabled, and yet about 80,000 of its working population were unemployed in the recent June quarter – double the unemployment rate for non-disabled people at just over 3%, according to Stats NZ. The underutilisation rate of the disabled community is more striking – nearly a quarter of the one million people living with a disability lack a job but are available to work. The statistic is almost two-and-a-half times that of non-disabled people, at 9%.
With all the labour shortages that exist in Aotearoa, and which the government is trying to plug with an extra 12,000 working holidaymakers, a potential workforce already exists. And yet as Jonathan Mosen, one of the few disabled chief executives in New Zealand, argues, the country has normalised the “invisibility” of disabled people.
Will & Able general manager Craig Burston has seen first-hand the barriers facing them: his 25-year-old son, Thomas, lives with Asperger’s, which makes it hard for him to relate socially to people. Over Zoom, Burston explains that when disabled people get their first job, their immediate supervisors often have unrealistic expectations of their capabilities. “They think they can work at 100% but they can’t…they never will be, they’re at 70%.” Moreover, workplaces may have the best of intentions in hiring disabled people, but they might lack diversity training within the business.
Workplaces like Will & Able exist as “springboards”, building the disabled community up with skills and confidence to potentially seek jobs in more mainstream workplaces if they want. The social enterprise is striving to employ 100 people so it must produce 10 times the 800,000 units it makes now, and earn 10 times the $2 million it currently does, Burston says. “There’s no shortage of people who could work for us. We’ve just got to really get the ball moving and create positions.”
Coe has had jobs before, but Will & Able is the job for him. “This is the one that gets me up in the morning and saying ‘Yes’. I get happy. I’m happy,” he says. “It’s a blessing – and it can be for so many other people.”
