People with Disabilities in the Workplace: Results of a Survey Conducted among Polish and Finnish Employers

Abstract

The key aspect of the inclusion of people with disabilities (PwD) in the workplace is how they are perceived by employers who make decisions on hiring employees. The article presents the results of CAWI (Computer Assisted Web Interview) research conducted among Polish and Finnish employers (n = 414) in 2021 using a proprietary questionnaire. Employers were asked to assess the state policy in the field of PwD’s inclusion, the social atmosphere in this respect, the level of acceptance of privileges/special solutions dedicated to PwD in the workplace and the knowledge of the specificity of disability. When analysing the obtained data, we verified the differentiation of Polish and Finnish employers’ assessments, the impact of respondents’ characteristics on their assessment and the relations between the assessments of various aspects of PwD’s inclusion. For the analysis, we used the t-test of independent samples for equality of means and the Pearson correlation coefficient. The results showed that Finnish respondents assess the conditions for the full inclusion of PwD much better than Polish ones. The characteristics most differentiating employers’ assessments is gender and the fact of employing PwD. There were also correlations between the responses of respondents in both countries to three out of four analysed questions from the questionnaire. The differences found in this study indicate that it would be worth extending the research to other European countries to generalize conclusions about the influence of cultural determinants on the situation of PwD on the labour market.