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Opinion | Reform Hong Kong’s laws to accommodate our disabled at work and elsewhere
- As poverty and job challenges grow, Hong Kong should change its laws so workplaces and other important areas in society provide reasonable accommodation for disabled people – a change that need neither be costly nor burdensome
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The poverty report released by the government last month was widely covered because of its dire finding that more than one in every five Hongkongers lived below the poverty line last year.
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This translates to a record-breaking 1.65 million people, although around a million were lifted out of poverty after receiving government help. Of particular interest to us at the Equal Opportunities Commission is whether people with disabilities bear a disproportionate burden of poverty.
The report provides no answer. A separate 2013 report showed that the pre-intervention poverty rate for disabled people hit 45.3 per cent that year, far higher than the 19.9 per cent territory-wide. The unemployment rate for disabled working-age people (18-64 years) was almost double that of the general population.
At the root of the problem is the lukewarm interest in employing disabled people. This can be attributed to employers’ reluctance to carry out or even learn about workplace or policy adjustments that can enable disabled people to fulfil the job requirements, and an assumption that these changes would often be costly and burdensome.
The Equal Opportunities Commission, therefore, has been advocating for the introduction of a duty under the Disability Discrimination Ordinance to provide reasonable accommodation for disabled people since our 2016 review of the city’s anti-discrimination legislation.
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The visually impaired woman working as a social media editor in China
The visually impaired woman working as a social media editor in China
This is not some radical idea from nowhere. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which has been in force in China, including Hong Kong, since August 31, 2008, explains reasonable accommodation as the “appropriate modification and adjustments” necessary to ensure that disabled people can exercise “all human rights and fundamental freedoms” on an equal basis with others, without “imposing a disproportionate or undue burden” on the party making the accommodation.
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