Access to Employment by People with Disabilities: A Critical Reading of the Italian Legal Provisions

The paper presents a critical examination of Italy’s current statutory legislation on the right to work of people with disabilities. The analysis is framed into the more general aspects of the relationship between organization and well-being, and aims at assessing whether the legislation on people with disabilities is consistent with the principle of reasonable accommodation introduced by the Council Directive 2000/78/EC and later taken up by the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In the authors’ view, the Italian legislation reveals a conception of the organization as a predetermined and intangible system that requires the adaptation of disabled individuals to the its own needs. As long as this conception persists, Italy will unlikely go beyond a merely apparent compliance with the principle of reasonable accommodation. As a result of this conception of the organization, public and private employers are not required to analyse and monitor work process as a whole in order to accommodate work situations, while aside from begging the question, employers have free rein to simply refuse to determine whether reasonable accommodation measures are possible. The critical examination will on the one hand rely on analysis criteria drawn from organizational theory, and on the other hand on international normative parameters. It will also refer to the biopsychosocial approach to classifying disabilities, which is the basis of the WHO International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), currently one of the major international benchmarks. In the conclusion, the paper illustrates how the analysis criteria allow passing from a criticism of the current legislation to a constructive position, by putting forward a few provisional suggestions for a better implementation of the principle of reasonable accommodation.