How Germany fails disabled people

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1:09This is a small group and we have here people with severe disabilities and a very high need of assistance. So right now you see...

1:19Amy Zayed:We're in a brightly lit room full of activity. The people here are working at a variety of different tasks. Here you see the young man right opposite from us. He's just learning how to wash the dishes. To wash the dishes. And to the left here we see a young man that can barely move his hand and we have built a construction that he's now using a paper shredder. and these people here are learning how to work. Absolutely understandable. We have the idea that every person is able to learn a job.

2:01Amy Zayed:Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. My name's Amy Zayed and I am one of a very few disabled journalists working in Germany today. In this edition of Assignment, I'm asking why so many German people with a disability are excluded from the world of work. Why inclusion is so difficult. I'm one of the lucky ones, but it could have been so different. At school, we were taken to see a careers advisor who asked me what I wanted to do. When I told him I wanted to be a journalist, he scoffed. Don't mess me around, he said. You're blind. Be serious.

2:43So here you see our gardening centre, basically, and we have all together...

2:49Amy Zayed:My guide today is Carla Bredenbals. She's in charge of this institution. It's what Germans call a Werkstatt für behinderte Menschen. In English we might say sheltered workshop. A workshop for disabled people. Carla is the CEO of a group of them owned by Caritas, a Roman Catholic charity.

3:16Amy Zayed:Emanuele is one of the young men working out here. He tells me he's been digging up tree roots. I think this project is a nice project because it shows that for us it's not always about working, it's about developing people. And these people who were in this group before, they were getting into trouble nearly every day. And since they've been up here, we haven't had any trouble with them at all. Workshops like this one in the north German city of Paderborn are controversial. Their critics say they exploit the people who work here. Among the accusations is that they are paid less than the minimum wage to do the same work that others do out in the mainstream economy on behalf of well-known companies and brands.

4:00Amy Zayed:There are some people who'd like the workshops closed down for good. Carla Breedenbald has heard it all before. Our mindset is about participation and developing people for the next level, the next step. And it does make me sad sometimes when I hear that all workshops in Germany seem to be bad and all workshops are thrown together in one pot. And it hurts me because for the people who work here, it's their job. And they want to have a good feeling when they go to work in the morning and not hear and read in the newspapers that these are bad businesses.

4:42Amy Zayed:Caritas runs 10 workshops in this region with around 1 ,600 disabled people. The question is, though, whether all these people should actually be there. Disabled people, once inside the workshop system, find it very hard to leave, and there are more than 300 ,000 of them all over Germany. Fewer than 1 % find their way back into a mainstream job. To their critics, workshops perpetuate the segregation in Germany of disabled and non-disabled people into parallel worlds. There is no group that experiences more discrimination than people with a disability. This is Hubert Hüppe, one of the most prominent critics of the system of sheltered workshops.

5:29Amy Zayed:His voice carries weight. He's not only a former member of the German parliament, but also a former federal commissioner appointed by the government to represent the interests of disabled people. And he says that Germany has an uncomfortable legacy to manage when it comes to discrimination against disabled people.

5:54The first group whose murder was organised by the Nazis wasn't the Jews, it wasn't the Roma, it wasn't homosexuals, it was people with a disability. What was done to them was later extended in a brutal fashion to other groups. And yet one is left with the feeling that the people with a disability who fell victim to this programme, they called it the T4 programme, suffered further discrimination because the perpetrators were, as a rule, much less severely punished than those who'd persecuted other groups.

6:27Amy Zayed:If the Nazi period represented the high point of discrimination against disabled people, discrimination didn't end after the war. A policy was institutionalised in which people with a disability were separated out. Special schools were created and special homes. The idea that disabled people might want to make decisions for themselves just wasn't acknowledged. The concept of inclusion didn't exist.

6:57Inclusion isn't something you can teach. You have to live it. And that's why you shouldn't put people with a disability in special institutions. Sometimes they do need protection, that's obvious. And workshops are sometimes described as protective workshops. But I often wonder who is being protected from whom. Is it the people with a disability who want protection from those without a disability, or is it the other way around?

7:27In principle, once you become part of this segregated system, you never get out of it. So you'll go from a special kindergarten into a special school and then into one of those sheltered workshops. Then you'll end up in a special care home and eventually you may even be buried there. Some of these homes have their own cemetery.

7:48Amy Zayed:Hubert Hüppe says his views on Germany's shortcomings in this regard are shared by others.

7:57It's also the opinion expressed by the United Nations where we were reprimanded for not being inclusive. It's said our workshops don't abide by the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People because people there are separated off.

8:14Amy Zayed:This was in 2023, when the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities took a broad swipe at Germany's poor record of inclusion in all areas of government, society and law. It expressed concern about the high rate of unemployment among disabled people, and specifically, it criticised the low rate of transition from workshops to the open labour market. Hubert Hüppe echoes this concern that the workshop system fails in its stated responsibility to rehabilitate its workers.

8:51This responsibility just isn't taken seriously because it's bad for business, because workshops are commercial enterprises that survive on what they produce. And so obviously they want to hang on to their best workers, the ones that would have the best chance of making it out in the mainstream economy, because otherwise they are not as profitable.

9:16Amy Zayed:Disability comes in a huge variety of guises and degrees of severity. In Germany there's a formalised system for entry into a workshop, which involves candidates being assessed both by the Federal Employment Agency or other public body, and the workshop itself. But it's hard not to avoid the conclusion that some people end up in a workshop by default, As Hubert Hooper says, the path from special school to workshop is well trodden. Just ask Dirk Haenel.

9:52Amy Zayed:Dirk is in his early 50s. He tells me that he's got epilepsy. He says he started out at a regular school, but in his second year was sent to a special school against his wishes.

10:10Amy Zayed:He says that when he first went to school, he had a super teacher who sat him in the front row and gave him lots of attention. But when she left, she was replaced by an older teacher who stuck him in the back row. He says his grades got worse and worse, and so eventually he ended up in the special school.

10:34Amy Zayed:When Dirk was about to finish school he says he was told the only option on offer was to go to a workshop He says he didn't want to do that and tried to find an apprenticeship He remembers going to one place and telling them that he had epilepsy and his prospective employer looking at him and saying We don't employ idiots here Under German law, companies with more than 20 employees have to employ at least one disabled person. Those who don't have to pay compensation. Many employers prefer simply to pay. They have a further incentive because if they outsource some of their production to a workshop, they pay less compensation.

11:21Amy Zayed:Dirk, when he was at a workshop, was working for companies with names that are well-known far beyond Germany. So what did you do at the Werkstatt? What was your work?

11:37Amy Zayed:Dirk says that his first job was to fold pieces of cardboard to make packaging for picture frames. He fitted keys to computer keyboards and then moved on to repairing computer monitors. Sometimes he'd help out his other colleagues if they were struggling, he says. Why did you then actually stop working for the workshop?

12:02Amy Zayed:He says he left because the work on offer simply wasn't challenging enough for him. Dirk and a colleague have now founded an organisation that's calling for reform and an improvement of conditions for disabled people who work in workshops. What is the main point of your campaign when it comes to Werkstatt and what do you want to achieve?

12:24Amy Zayed:They want the government to understand that the law needs to be changed. The most important thing, he says, is that people in workshops are paid better. The thing is that people who work in workshops are not technically employed. They have what we might call a quasi-employee status, and so they are not, for instance, eligible to join a trade union. Dirk wants this to change.

13:00Amy Zayed:There is another side to this story. There are people who work in workshops and are fulfilled by doing so.

13:11Amy Zayed:Back at the Caritas Workshop in Paderborn, we meet Medina Arnaut. She's 35 and has been here for several years. Nowadays, she's the chair of the Werkstattrat, the workshop council. Not a trade union as such, but nonetheless a body that represents the disabled workers here.

13:35What I've been hearing a lot recently is people saying, I don't want to go and work in the mainstream economy. I want to stay in the workshop. Why don't people understand that? Or they say, how can I make it clear that the workshop is important to me? I've worked out there and the pressure is completely different.

13:57Amy Zayed:I asked Medina whether she had ever felt that the workshop didn't challenge her enough. My full-time job on the workshop council keeps me very busy. Honestly, it's never boring. I do understand that some people think that. And perhaps they are right. But then I always say to them, go and talk to someone, one of the social workers here, and see what your options are. See if there's something you'd like better. There is a movement in Germany, especially amongst disability activists, that they wish for workshops to be abolished. How do you see that? That would be a terrible mistake. Because we've got so many colleagues who are grateful that workshops exist.

14:46These are people who quite simply need this workshop environment because of their disability. The workshop gives these colleagues a certain security. I'm accepted here for who I am. You know, that kind of thing. And you also hear people say things like, I'm so grateful that the workshop exists because I have experienced life out there in the commercial world. And it made me ill.

15:38We'll be right back.

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16:39Amy Zayed:This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Amy Zayed, on assignment in Germany. There are organisations that are trying to change the situation. One of them is called Inclu Solutions.

16:58Amy Zayed:What this organisation does is coach companies on how it would be possible for them to take people with disabilities onto their staff. And, full disclosure, I work as a coach for Inclu Solutions every now and then. Nächste Station, Delmenhorst. I'm on my way to see one of the co-founders, Özlem Çetin. Now in her 40s, Özlem remembers what happened to her when as a school leaver she first went to ask for careers advice. They look at my grades and they told me, OK, your name is Özlem, it's a Turkish name, not a German name. You're a woman and you're a disabled person. that will be really hard for you to find a job in Germany.

17:43So either you hide your disability or do you want to change your name to a German name? These were all the advices that I got. So that's why I tried to find a job outside from Germany, not in Germany.

17:58Amy Zayed:Özlem ended up working all over the world as a senior manager in the automotive business. She went to the UK, to Turkey and to Japan. But six years ago, she came back to Germany. I was looking for a new job and I find out that the situation in Germany did not change. People have the same question in their mind. Okay, I'm done with my education now. I'm looking for a job. But should I hide my disability? Is it a disadvantage if I put my disability on my CV? And that was the turnover on my head where I said something needs to change now. And that's when she and a partner decided to set up their new business.

18:40Amy Zayed:She says they've made progress in the intervening time. But with Germany now in economic difficulty, that progress has ground to a halt. What I can tell you now is since one year, everything get worse, even worse than for six years ago. Now, the focus is not anymore on diversity and inclusion. Not at all. Even within this one year, we can really see that the companies do not have any time anymore, even to talk about disability. Every time when we try to convince the companies to make changes, they say, oh, it's a great thing, but we don't have time for this, and we don't have money for this. We're going to the fuller.