I have heard many similar stories. I myself was born blind, and I remember well my first school report, when I was six years old, which advised my parents to send me to a school for children with learning disabilities.
I grew up speaking both German and Arabic and constantly mixed them, not realizing that they were different languages. If my parents hadn’t ignored that first school report, I might have ended up in a workshop, too. Instead, today I am one of the very few journalists in Germany who has a visible disability.
Huppe says the workshop system has failed in one of its most basic responsibilities – to rehabilitate people with disabilities to prepare them for work in the mainstream economy.
“This responsibility is not taken seriously,” he tells me.
This is due in part to the economic incentives that are given to German companies to support the system. In Germany, any company that employs more than 20 people is legally obliged to employ at least one disabled person.
The minimum quota for big companies is 5%. Those who fail to meet this commitment have to pay a sum as compensation into the central fund supporting people with disabilities in the workplace.
Many companies choose to simply pay this money instead of meeting their quota. They are offered another incentive by the system, in which the compensation paid to them is reduced if they outsource production to a workshop.
The result is that less than 1% of people with disabilities make a successful transition from workshop to employment in a mainstream company.
Huppe also says workshops are reluctant to see their best employees move on. “Clearly a workshop is a commercial enterprise that survives on its production,” says Huppe. “And so obviously they want to retain their best workers who will have the best chance of getting into the mainstream economy.”
He points me to a report for 2023, external by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which criticized Germany’s record on disability.
In particular, it noted “the high number of persons with disabilities enrolled in sheltered workshops and the low rate of transition to the open labor market”.
However, not everyone is unhappy with being employed at the workshop, including 35-year-old Medina Arnaut. She works for a workshop in Paderborn run by a charity called Caritas.
Arnaut is also chairman of the local workshop council, which, like a trade union, represents the interests of workers.
“We have colleagues here who are very grateful that the workshops exist,” she says. “These are colleagues who need this workshop environment because of their disability.”
Arnaut says many of her colleagues have worked in the mainstream economy and the pressures are completely different there. “People come up to me and say, I’ve experienced life in the business world and it’s made me sick.”
