Business Owner’s Tips – Rehabilitation Services
Sheltered workshops and other services to provide jobs and rehabilitation training for the disabled or injured can provide workers and space for small businesses.
Dennis Myers is an industrial engineer with expertise in metal working who has jumped back and forth between corporate America and entrepreneurship throughout his career. After Dennis built up a division to grind and sharpen the extremely small drills used by the circuit board industry, his employer decided to drop the line of work. So Dennis started Facet Industries to do the job.
“I needed some minimum-experienced people and a place to locate the operation,” Dennis says. “I worked out a deal with an agency that rehabilitated disabled and handicapped people in Mission Viejo, California. In exchange for my business employing some of their people, they provided free a facility and a supervisor, who was a college graduate, who aided in training the workers.”
The rehabilitation agency didn’t give Facet Industries capital, but gave space rent free and training supervision, saving the capital Facet Industries did have for other uses.
“All in all, it was worth thousands of dollars a month to me and a steady source of employees. They were some of my best employees and the most reliable,” Dennis adds. “I paid the workers so I was providing jobs and training. That was the payoff for the rehabilitation agency.”
Much of the work at Facet Industries was detailed and repetitive. The drills were the size of a pin, so grinding was detailed work. They needed to be cleaned and then shaped on a semi-automatic machine. Some of his workers were developmentally disabled but capable of doing the repetitious work under the tutelage of the supervisor.
“They worked hard and didn’t have bad habits that some workers bring to the workplace,” Dennis says. Some of his able-bodied workers would walk off the job after a couple of days never returning even to pick up their paycheck. In contrast, Dennis remembers one rehabilitation worker who learned to use a micrometer to check the size of each drill and sorted them into bins according to size. He never missed a day of work and sometimes even stood in the rain waiting for Dennis to open the doors.
Every state has state and federal funding to help reeducate and train people who are injured and can no longer work at the jobs they held prior to being injured and to train the physically and developmentally disabled. Most states have rehabilitation training centers and sheltered workshops and seek contracts with companies in the community that need assembly, sorting, collating of printed materials, labeling, and bulk mailing services.
Some states permit below-minimum-wage jobs, paying the workers according to the labor they can do. For example, if a supervisor can assemble six chairs in an hour and the rehabilitation client can assemble one, then the client-worker earns a sixth the standard wage for that job.
The workshops even market for the contracts, just as other private businesses would. Some rehabilitation specialists strive to have the training and jobs at sites in the community where a company’s other employees work, so that the disabled have interaction with a broader cross-section of their neighbors.
After several years, Dennis closed Facet Industries and moved on to other executive industrial assignments and businesses. Today he’s an executive coach and industrial consultant. He still says his rehabilitation workers were among the most reliable he ever had. “The biggest underutilized resource[s] in American business are the disabled and elderly workers,” he says.