Absenteeism of people with disabilities in the construction industry in Brazil

1 Introduction

Employment is the main path for social inclusion and participation in modern societies. Having a job is not only the basis for the survival and stability for many individuals, but also a key way of accessing many rights as citizens. Therefore, the welfare and the social inclusion of people with disabilities (PWDs) depends very much on the degree of labor integration they are able to achieve [1]. Within this context, the inclusion of the PWDs in the social labor environment has been widely discussed and encouraged by several laws, for example, quotas set in many countries for the employment of PWDs [2].

Data from several countries show that employment rates of PWD are smaller than the general population [3]. A study showed that in 27 countries, the employment rate for working-age PWDs, on average, was 44%, while for people without disability it was 75% [4]. In the meantime, in Brazil, in 2015, only 403,2 thousand workers were declared with disabilities, representing 0.84% of the total workers in the country [5]. Unfortunately, workers with disabilities are very often seen as a problem to be dealt with instead of an opportunity that can be beneficial to companies [6]. Besides, PWDs are underrepresented in jobs that require professional qualification and offer good salaries, but are well represented in low-skilled jobs and low wages [7].

This could happen because employees with disabilities are thought to perform less well, have more accidents, lower attendance rates and higher turnover [8, 9], lack of work experience [10]. It's like these perceptions persist due to a lack of knowledge or contact to PWDs or unsuccessful experiences with these employees [11]. However, employer's attitudes have become more positive as their experiences with PWDs increase [12].

In the construction industry, typically, PWDs in the United Kingdom work in offices rather than construction sites, in most construction companies. Civil construction employers say it is easier to employ PWDs in office activities due to the nature of the construction activities, and also because it can be difficult to match the abilities of PWDs with the job demands and the environment. Furthermore, the types of disability that they have are not known, neither the relationship between the environment and the disability, nor the impacts of that environment, such as the type of work [13].

In this context, some studies are found in the literature evaluating the absence of PWDs, but most is through a questionnaire to employers and to Human Resources Managers [14–16], and few use absenteeism data of companies [17, 18]. Therefore, the purpose of the research was to evaluate the absenteeism of PWDs in the construction industry in the metropolitan area of Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil.

2 Methods

This research was conducted between 2014 and 2015 with the PWDs who worked in the vertical construction sites of the companies associated with the Construction Industry Union in the State of Pernambuco (SINDUSCON-PE), in the metropolitan area of Recife, Brazil.

The field research was conducted in two stages. The first stage was to identify which companies had PWDs in vertical construction sites of the Metropolitan Region of Recife (MRR) and the jobs that these workers performed. Therefore, the SINDUSCON-PE sent an e-mail to the Human Resources department of 233 member companies requesting information on: the presence of PWDs, location of the construction site and job performed.

Eighteen companies responded stating that there were PWDs in vertical construction sites. So, phone calls were made to the construction sites to request the companies’ authorization to participate in the research. After contacting the companies, one company was excluded because the work site was out of the MRR, another company did not authorize the research, and in six companies, the PWDs had been fired. Thus, eight companies participated in the research.

In the second stage, the sites were visited for data collection. The study participants were interviewed in the workplace itself and answered a questionnaire in order to obtain information on sociodemographic aspects, on disability and accommodations and the Work Limitations Questionnaire (WLQ) [19].

The WLQ is a self-administrable questionnaire, with 25 items, which measures the degree of interference of health problems in the ability to perform tasks at work and the impact of that interference in productivity [19]. According to this questionnaire, the respondent evaluates their level of difficulty performing work tasks generating a final score. The 25 items are grouped into four areas of work limitation: time management, physical demands, mental-interpersonal demands and output demands. Together, they encompass the multidimensional character of the tasks undertaken at work. Each scale has a score ranging from difficult none of the time (0%), difficult a slight bit of the time (25%), difficult some of the time (about 50%), difficult most of the time (75%) and difficult all of the time (100%).

In addition, companies were requested to offer quantitative data of the absenteeism of the last 12 months of each PWDs and the largest amount of workers without disabilities who performed similar tasks. From then on, the data were compiled in Microsoft Excel version 2010 software to perform comparative analysis of the absenteeism between workers with and without disabilities.

In addition, with the purpose of comparing the absenteeism of PWDs and persons without disabilities, the companies provided quantitative data of the monthly absenteeism of the last 12 months of each PWDs and the largest amount of workers without disabilities who performed the same activities of each PWDs. Then, the relative absenteeism of PWDs was obtained by the ratio between the average monthly absenteeism of the workers with and without disabilities that performed the same activities of each PWDs. From then on, the data were compiled to perform comparative analysis of absenteeism between workers with and without disabilities.

3 Results

The average age of the sample was 41.04 years old and SD of±10.60, the average time of onset the disability was 25.84 years before±15.24, the average time that the job was performed was 9.08 years±9.66, and the average time working in the company was 4.21 years±5.28. In addition, 100% of PWDs said it was not necessary to carry out further accommodations at work. The descriptive data of the research are presented on the Table 1.

The WLQ score obtained is shown on Table 2. It is noticed that, on average, in the two weeks before, PWDs had difficulties in 7.77% of the time to perform tasks that required body strength, endurance, movement, coordination and flexibility (physical demand), at 4.37% of the time to meet schedules and tasks in the allotted time (time management) and difficulty in 2.30% of the time in the ability to a finish work on time, the quantity and necessary quality of work (output demand).

Table 3 presents the results of variables according to the type of disability. The results show that persons with partial hearing loss were, on average, the oldest ones, and also the ones who have spent the longest time working in the companies, besides the longest time performing the same occupation. The time of onset of the disability had a higher average for workers with full hearing disability and the average score of the WLQ summed score was higher for persons with physical disabilities. Moreover, it is observed that 33.33% of workers who have physical disabilities are laborers, besides that, organizational adjustments were made for 66.66% of persons with physical disabilities. Besides, all the accommodations made by the companies were of organizational type such perform lighter tasks and not to handle heavy objects and prohibition to work at height.

The relative absenteeism of PWDs was obtained by the ratio between the average absenteeism of the workers with and without disabilities that performed the same activities of each PWDs. Table 4 shows the quantity of workers without disabilities who had their absenteeism compared to those with disabilities.

The results showed that the mean absenteeism of the PWDs corresponded to 119.00% and SD±1.22 of the absenteeism of the workers without disabilities, which means 19.00% higher in relation to workers without disabilities. This difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.238) by t test.

Furthermore, when analyzing each absenteeism data of the worker with disability compared to those without disabilities, it was found that 40.00% (n = 10) of the PWDs had higher absenteeism, while 12.00% (n = 3) had the same level of absenteeism and 48.00% (n = 12) had lower absenteeism.

The higher the age and the time that the worker performs the job, the lower absenteeism of PWDs compared to those without disabilities. Regarding the level of education, PWDs who did not conclude high school showed 38.80% higher absenteeism in relation to the workers without disabilities. Whereas PWDs who had higher educational level showed 36.43% (p = 0,033) lower absenteeism than workers without disabilities, so this difference was statistically significant by t test. Moreover, the time of onset of the disability does not affect the probability of having more absenteeism in relation to workers without disabilities.

In cases where there were not accommodations, workers with disabilities had 64.37% (p = 0.001) of higher absenteeism than those without disabilities. Whereas in the cases where these accommodations were made, the absenteeism of PWDs was 19.89% inferior than the absenteeism of workers without disabilities. Furthermore, the WLQ summed score indicated that the higher the score, the lower the PWDs absenteeism, compared to those without disabilities, this difference was statistically significant (p = 0.023) by t test.

Table 5 presents the relative absenteeism of the PWDs according to the type of disability, job and origin of disability. It is important to note that as there was insufficient amount of worker with partial and full hearing disabilities and multiple disabilities, it was not possible to obtain the p-value through the statistical method adopted by the research.

The results of this research showed that all PWDs were male. This result could be explained due to the fact that in 2015, there were 2.5 million workers in the civil construction sector in Brazil, of which 92.0% were male and 8.0% female [5]. Besides that, considering only the workers with disabilities, 64.23% are male and 35.76% female [5]. Therefore, these results corroborate with Ozawa and Yeo [23], which shows that men with disabilities were more likely to be employed than women.

The results of this research showed that all PWDs were male, corroborating with the result of Ozawa and Yeo [23] that men with disabilities were more likely to be employed than women. Besides, analysis of the World Health Survey results for 51 countries gives employment rates of 52.8% for men with disability and 19.6% for women with disability, compared with 64.9% for non-disabled men, and 29.9% for non-disabled women [3].

Most of the sample had some work experience, because the average time they exerted the job and the average time worked in the company was 9.08 years and 4.21 years, respectively. This result is higher than the total of the Brazilian construction workers in 2013, who were working for 1.82 years, on average [24]. Other research shows that PWDs remained in the workplace for 4.26 months longer than those without disabilities [25]. This can happen because the companies are satisfied with the performance of these workers with disabilities or because of the need to comply with the PWDs’ quota laws [26], so that there is greater retention of these workers.

In Brazil, 57.22% of all workers in the construction industry had not completed high school [5], whereas PWDs who took part in this research, since 72% of them had not completed high school. In addition, other studies in Brazil in different economic sectors showed that 70% [27] and 55% [28] of the PWDs had not completed high school. Respondents with disability in the World Health Survey experience significantly lower rates of primary school completion and fewer mean years of education than respondents with­out disabilities. For all 51 countries in the analysis, 50.6% of males with disability have completed primary school, compared with 61.3% of males without disability [3].

Workers with physical disabilities corresponded to 72% of the workers in the research sample, a similar result to other studies in various productive sectors [29, 30] and different from that of Jang, Wang and Lin [31] where the highest proportion was of persons with visual and hearing disabilities. In this sense, this higher proportion of people with physical disabilities in the sample may be due to greater access to education, because according to Lancillotti [32], in Brazil, this group of persons has advantages in education over the other types of PWDs. Furthermore, children with physical disabilities generally faring better enrolment rates than those with intellectual or sensory disabilities [3].

Regarding the jobs that were carried out, 32% of the workers were laborers, 20% bricklayers and 12% were bricklayer assistants. Thus, it is clear that most workers performed auxiliary jobs in civil construction, working paired with another professional, which requires lower professional qualification, generating lower wages and lower valuation. This result is similar to that found in the literature, as PWDs take low-skilled jobs [27, 33], with low wages [7], in the production area [29], such as laborer [34], cleaner, janitor, doorman, collector, stockman, packer and general assistant [33]. In addition, the PWDs are not adequately represented in valued jobs in civil construction companies [35]. Therefore, the carrying out of auxiliary jobs in construction by the majority of the sample may have occurred because of the low educational level, the decrease in functional capacity due to disability and also by prejudice and lack of knowledge of the capabilities and potentialof PWDs.

Companies perform accommodations at work to 56% of the PWDs. This result was higher to that found in the research carried out by Hartnett et al. [36] and Hogan et al. [37], in which accommodations were made to 43.9% and 33.6% of PWDs. In this sense, it turns out that it is not always necessary to have work accommodations for the employment of PWDs, given that, PWDs are able to perform various jobs. However, not having accommodations in the workplace can also occur because some companies hire workers whose disabilities do not require adjustments at work [38].

Moreover, it was observed that all the accommodations made by the companies were of organizational type and the most frequent one (64.28%) was for PWDs to perform lighter tasks and not to handle heavy objects. Other research shows that 64% [39] and 66% [30] of employers redistributednon-essential tasks to other workers, while 73% of companies in the civil construction made organizational accommodations, such as transferring PWDs to other jobs and redistributing tasks to other workers [40]. Thus, the redistribution of tasks and requesting help for another employee to perform non-essential tasks is a useful accommodation for the labor inclusion of PWDs [34].

All the accommodations were classified as the organizational type, and that may be related to a standard characteristic of the construction industry. The temporary nature of a construction site makes it difficult to maintain any physical adjustments to structures, access routes or other measures [13]. In this sense, it is believed that due to constant changes in work sites, companies avoid performing physical accommodations to the workplace, so, the organizational accommodations prevail.

Regarding the outcome of the WLQ, physical demand (7.77) was the item with the highest value, followed by time management (4.37), output demand (2.30) and mental-interpersonal demand (0.46). The fact that physical demand has been the item that generated more difficulties for PWDs may be related to the physical demands of the activities at the construction sites.

In research Verhoef et al. [41] with Dutch workers of different jobs in the service sector, with physical disabilities, who worked for an average of 18 hours a week, it was found the following values of WLQ: time management (25.00), physical demand (21.90), mental-interpersonal demand (19.40) and output demand (20.00). This difference in the scores may have been caused by the fact that the researches were conducted in countries with different realities and jobs. In addition, in this study, Brazilian workers had higher working hours (average of 44 hours per week), low educational level, which can influence the understanding of the questionnaire, and 24% of the participants in this study had sensory disabilities (visual and hearing), unlike the Verhoef et al. [41] research, of which the sample was composed by people with physical disabilities and by the people who suffered cerebral palsy.

When comparing the absenteeism of each PWDs to the absenteeism of the workers without disabilities, it was found that 40.00% of the PWDs had higher absenteeism, while 12.00% had equal absenteeism and 48.00% had lower absenteeism. By analyzing the findings in the literature, results found that employers of unidentified economic sectors stated that the absenteeism of workers with disabilities was equal or lower [14–16] than of those without disabilities. Besides, this result is similar than that found by Graffama et al. [18] who conducted a study in Australia with 643 employers of PWDs where workers with disabilities showed a decrease of 38% in absenteeism for workers without disabilities.

However, the study found a higher absenteeism of 19%, on average, of workers with disabilities in relation to those without disabilities. This result was similar to research Adams-Shollenberger and Mitchell [17] that workers with disabilities had higher rates of absenteeism than those without disabilities. However, this result may have been influenced because the workers with partial visual disabilities (monocular) had 116% higher absenteeism in relation to those without disabilities.

The workers with physical disabilities were the ones who had lower rates of absenteeism in relation to those without disabilities. This result may have been found, because people with physical disabilities were those that had the highest WLQ summed score, and the higher this variable, the lower the absenteeism. Moreover, in cases that organizational accommodations were made, the absenteeism of PWDs was 19.89% lower than for the workers without disabilities, since people with physical disability were the ones who had higher rates of accommodations made by the companies. Besides, in cases where there were not accommodations, workers with disabilities had 64.37% of higher absenteeism than those without disabilities. In this sense, implementing workplace accommodations is a vital tool for increasing job employment for individuals with disabilities [2].

Thus, it appears that accommodations to the jobs are essential to reduce unemployment of PWDs [42]. This is why the extent of the impact of the disease on the job is related to both the person and the work context (i.e. environmental factors) and the way they interact [43]. In this sense, organizational accommodations in the workplace can be an effective and inexpensive alternative that enable employment of PWDs.

The research results show that the higher education the lower absenteeism for workers without disabilities. This result is similar to research Rocha et al. [44], Primo, Pine and Sakurai [45], where workers with higher education had lower absenteeism. This may occur because of these workers presents better socioeconomic and the acquired knowledge about health care conditions, including food, according to which workers with higher education have more access to information [44].

In this context, despite the cases in which there was higher absenteeism, there are studies that show benefits for companies with the hiring of PWDs. In the Solovieta et al. [42, 46] research, the key benefits obtained by the companies with the accommodations of the workplace of the PWDs were: maintenance of skilled workers, increase worker productivity, elimination of training costs of new employees, improvement of relations among workers, increasing of the company’s moral and general productivity. Moreover, the employment of PWDs can improve the company’s image [36]. Besides, it is important to emphasize that ergonomic principles have a fundamental role to increase the social and work participation of individuals with disabilities [47]. Then, it is believed that employing PWDs can bring about benefits for companies, for PWDs and for society.

The research has some limitations, because the analysis could be more statistically significant if it had been held in a bigger sample. However, this research is important for the subject because in the literature are few studies with real data of the absenteeism of PWDs in the construction industry.

Thus, due to the lack of research of real cases on the absenteeism of the PWDs in the construction industry, it is recommended to conduct further research with larger samples in order to analyze the absenteeism of workers with and without disabilities in this sector. In this sense, the objective is to encourage the employment of PWDs as well as the knowledge about their potential, especially in this economic sector, because it presents a high risk of accidents and also because it generates many jobs in Brazil, even though it has low employment rates among PWDs.

5 Conclusions

The research results showed that all workers were male, most had physical disability and exercised auxiliary jobs in civil construction. Moreover, it was found that most of the workers with disabilities had lower absenteeism than those without disability. However, the mean absenteeism of PWDs was higher in relation to workers without disabilities. In addition, workers higher educational level, the laborer of auxiliary warehouse, the workers for whom the companies have not made accommodations to the workplace and the higher WLQ summed score lower statistically significantly absenteeism in relation to workers without disabilities. Nonetheless, the results of the research should be analyzed carefully, not allowing to make generalizations, since the research sample was small.

Therefore, in the labour employment of the PWDs it is suggested to evaluate each case separately and it should be taken into account the ergonomics issues and occupational safety, since the employment of the PWDs, as any other worker, should not generate hazardous situations, occupational accidents or work-related injuries.

In this sense, this research intends to contribute on the literature in the labor employment of PWDs. Thus, it is expected that in the near future, the PWDs is no longer just a person receiving government social benefits or performing poorly valued jobs in the companies, but occupying important positions and with good salaries, bringing about profits for companies, giving dignity to their families, increasing their self-esteem and quality of life.

Conflict of interest

None to report.