Abstract
BACKGROUND:
Many people living with mental illness want paid work, but finding and maintaining mainstream employment remains challenging. In recent decades, social enterprises have emerged as one alternative site for paid employment. Existing research has examined the experiences of people with mental illness working in social enterprises, but less is known about the organizational character of these workplaces.
OBJECTIVE:
The objective of this paper is to develop a better understanding of social enterprises as organizational contexts for workers with mental illness.
METHODS:
The research employed a qualitative methodology, conducting semi-structured interviews with executive directors and managers at 42 organizations operating 67 social enterprises across Canada
RESULTS:
While there are strong similarities in organizational mandate to create meaningful employment there are also important variations between social enterprises. These include variations in size, economic activity and organizational structure, as well as differences in hours of work, rates of pay and the nature and extent of workplace accommodation. These variations reflect both immediate organizational contexts as well as broader economic constraints that enterprises confront.
CONCLUSIONS:
Understanding the varied nature of social enterprises is important for thinking about future enterprise development, and the capacity of such organizations to create meaningful employment for people living with mental illness.
Introduction
The past decade has seen a small, but growing literature on the role of social enterprises as sites of paid work for people living with significant mental illness [1–11]. This interest has come from the recognition that social enterprises, as organizations within the broader social economy, have the capacity to create employment opportunities and work environments that are different from those opportunities found in ‘mainstream’ workplaces in the for-profit sector. With respect to the latter, there is now a compelling body of work that demonstrates the multiple barriers and challenges that people with significant mental illness face in their efforts to find and keep paid employment in ‘mainstream’ workplaces. These include enduring stigma and discrimination and a lack of appropriate workplace accommodation. Mainstream employers continue to report little understanding of what reasonable accommodation for someone with mental health problems would entail [11–13]. At the same time, workers are reluctant to disclose mental illness for fear of discrimination and dismissal [14–16]. The impact of these barriers and constraints is seen in the consistently low rates of employment for people living with mental illness. The 2012 Canadian Survey on Disability, for example, found that the employment rate for people reporting any mental health-related disability was 36 percent [17], and this rate is lower still for people experiencing significant mental ill health. The median income for people with mental health-related disabilities was less than half that of the non-disabled population, while almost 60 percent of people identified ‘government transfers’ as their main source of income [17, 18].
While mental illness can itself represent an important barrier to employment, studies repeatedly find that many people living with mental illness want to, and are capable of, work for pay. Moreover, research consistently demonstrates that “ongoing, secure employment provides pathways to economic participation, social inclusion and recovery” [9 p.53, 19]. In this context, understanding how to create more accommodating and supportive work environments and employment opportunities for people with significant mental illness remains an important and ongoing challenge.
Recent interest in social enterprises represents one response to this challenge. Social enterprises are organizations with an entrepreneurial orientation [20] but: “their prime interest does not lie in profit-maximisation, but in building social capacity and responding to under-met needs … and in the process creating new forms of work (p. 1). These organizations are part of a larger social economy that exists between the public and private sectors [21]. Many social enterprises providing employment for people with mental illness are operated by non-profit organizations, while others exist as worker cooperatives created and run by people with mental illness themselves.
While research is still limited [11], a number of studies have begun to demonstrate the value of social enterprises as enabling economic spaces [22]. Studies have pointed to the capacity of social enterprises to provide flexible meaningful employment opportunities, job security, a broad range of workplace accommodations, as well as supportive workplace relationships and social environments. Collectively, existing research suggests that social enterprises have the potential to create work environments that are conducive to stable/secure employment [9], improved well-being [5], better quality of work life [7] and greater job satisfaction [8] for people with mental illness.
In some ways, then, social enterprises as sites of employment for people with significant mental illness hold tremendous potential. At the same time, there is evidence that such enterprises may have more limited success in raising people’s incomes and in providing opportunities for advancement within the workplace [9]. Some authors have linked these challenges to the constraints of disability benefit systems with respect to earned income [23], and to the fairly narrow range of low-wage, low-skill work opportunities provided by social enterprises [6, 24]. Others have drawn attention to the ways in which the social economy is ‘disciplined’ by the pressures and logics of a larger market economy [25].
More broadly, social enterprises confront a variety of organizational challenges that may limit their capacity to create work opportunities that are accommodating for, and supportive of, people with mental illness. In a paper in this journal, Villotti et al. make brief mention of this issue, noting that organizational constraints may impact people’s job performance and satisfaction within social enterprises [8]. These authors call for further work on the ‘organizational aspects’ of social enterprise employment and its impact on workers within these organizational settings. However, the issue of organizational context and constraint as a factor shaping people’s experience of employment within social enterprises has yet to receive sufficient attention. This is a significant absence given that organizational dimensions such as mission, objectives, structure, membership, funding, and external relations constitute significant influences on workplace experiences [26]. Moreover, the creation of what Williams et al characterize as ‘sustainable employment’ for people with mental illness [9] relies on the capacity of social enterprises to sustain themselves as organizations.
In this paper we are concerned with developing a better understanding of social enterprises as organizational contexts for workers with mental illness. Using data from interviews conducted with executive directors and managers at 42 different organizations operating 67 social enterprises across Canada, the paper analyzes similarities and differences across organizational contexts, assessing the extent to which these contextual factors shape the type of the work opportunities offered, and the nature and extent of workplace accommodations provided. The paper also examines the extent to which organizational environments evolve over time in response to changing opportunities and constraints. In so doing, the paper provides insight into the contextual factors that shape social enterprise employment.
Method
This paper is part of a larger project focused on understanding the types of social enterprises providing employment for people with mental ill health, the challenges associated with creating and sustaining accommodating workplaces, and the experiences of people working in these enterprises. We define ‘social enterprises’ as organizations that use business practice to pursue social goals. Social enterprise organizations have an entrepreneurial orientation but: “their prime interest does not lie in profit-maximization, but in building social capacity (e.g., through employing or training socially disadvantaged groups) and responding to under-met needs … and in the process creating new forms of work” [20, p. 1]. Social enterprise organizations are part of a larger social economy that exists between the public and private sectors [27]. Many of these organizations are non-profit while others are for-profit enterprises with strong social missions.
Data collection and participants
The study involved three stages of data collection. First, we created a database of social economy organizations offering work to people living with mental illness. To constrain our search, we focused on organizations that work primarily, but not necessarily exclusively, with people with mental illness. We also focused for the most part on organizations that offer paid employment. Sources of information were varied and included: existing research; Internet and media searches; contact with other social economy initiatives, and snowballing (i.e., using one a contact at one organization to identify others in the local area). These sources produced an initial list of 75 different organizations. Of those, 8 were eliminated because they were no longer in existence, 2 did not have a focus on mental health, and 17 were not, on further investigation, providing employment opportunities. This gave us a final list of 48 organizations.
In the second stage of the project we approached all of these organizations, requesting an interview with a ‘key informant’ – typically either the executive director or manager of an enterprise. We were able to contact 42 of these 48 organizations, and conducted 46 interviews (with multiple interviews at four of the larger organizations). The enterprises included in the study are located in eight of ten Canadian provinces. Interviews included questions on organizational history, size, employment type, wage/ pay rates, organizational structure, governance and decision-making, workplace accommodations, budgets and revenues (see Table 1). Among enterprises, there was significant variation in the size of the workforce, ranging from 3 people at a thrift store to more than 150 people working at a packaging enterprise. Enterprises also exhibited differences in organizational structure. A key distinction was between enterprises that were operated by mental health service organizations and those run by people living with mental illness themselves (sometimes referred to as ‘consumer/survivor businesses’). However, the dividing line between service-led and consumer-survivor led enterprises was not always absolute. For example, some enterprises created under the auspices of a larger service organization or psychiatric hospital were later operated at arm’s length and staffed principally by people living with mental illness, even though they remained governed by the board of the larger organization. With respect to the workforce, 31 of the 42 organizations provided employment opportunities exclusively for people with mental illness.
We did not ask key informants specifically about the types and degree of mental illness experienced by social enterprise employees. In part, this decision reflected the fact that enterprises were oriented towards hiring a broad population of ‘mental health consumers’ or ‘people with mental health needs’. In our interviews with workers at social enterprises, many were living with/recovering from significant forms of mental ill health, including Schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder and Persistent Depression.
Organizational characteristics
For some consumer/ survivor enterprises, this exclusive focus was linked to their origins within the mental health community. For service-led organizations, government funding was often linked specifically to the provision of service/employment for this population. Of the remaining 11, five were oriented towards employment for people with mental illness and intellectual/developmental disabilities, while others had mandates that included multiple barriers to employment (e.g., mental health, addiction, homelessness). None of the organizations were attempting to integrate workers with mental ill health with other non-disabled workers, a point to which we return in the discussion.
Social Enterprise Activities
Finally, the organizations we had contact with operated a total of 67 different businesses (Table 2). In a 2006 study, Kirsh et al. suggested that work initiatives for people with mental illness have traditionally been limited to 4F jobs; food, filth (cleaning), filing (packaging), and flowers (landscape/gardening) [6]. As is evident from the table, almost half of the enterprises were focused on these sectors. At the same time, there is a broad range of activities not encompassed by the ‘4Fs’ (e.g., retail stores, furniture and clothing manufacturing, market gardening, computer repair and refurbishment, and so on), suggesting that this designation may not fully capture a diverse population of enterprises.
In the third stage of our project we collected opinions and input from people with mental illness currently working at social enterprises. We conducted a combination of one-on-one interviews and focus groups with 68 workers at 12 organizations. These organizations included enterprises run by service organizations as well as consumer/survivor businesses. They also covered a range of different economic activities (janitorial services, café and catering, landscaping, market gardening, packaging), those managed by people living with mental ill health. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed in full for analysis. Respondents in these interviews were provided with a $20 honorarium to recognize the value of their input to the research.
In this paper, we focus attention on the data obtained from executive directors and enterprise managers. In part this focus reflects the word limits of a single paper but more substantively it reflects the fact that recent studies have called for attention to the viewpoints of employers and work supervisors to complement the views of enterprise employees [8, 9]. The key informants presented here provide useful information on the broader organizational context of enterprise employment, as well as the ways in which organizational mandates and practices have evolved over time in response to multiple factors.
Analysis of key informant interviews began with both authors conducting a preliminary read through of transcripts to determine macro-level codes relating to the organizational and workplace characteristics. This was then followed by a more detailed reading of transcripts to elucidate the range of strategies used by organizations to create workplaces and work tasks that fit with the varying capacities of workers with mental ill health, as well as the tensions involved in creating and sustaining these workplaces. Once the first and second authors reached consensus with respect to the structure of the coding framework, transcripts were coding using NVIVO.
Results
As we suggested at the outset, the analytical focus of this paper is on the ways in which organizational contexts and constraints shape the nature of work and work environments created by social enterprises. The first section of the analysis examines similarities and differences across enterprises with respect to different aspects of work tasks and work environments. The second focuses specifically on the nature of accommodations and supports provided by enterprises.
Work environments
Business activity
Previous research has reported on workers’ experiences in social enterprises engaged in a range of business activities, including cleaning services, packaging, catering and café work, and landscaping ([5, 28]. However, studies have not consistently reported why enterprises selected these business activities, although the decision has implications for the kind of employment opportunities made available to workers with mental illness.
When asked, respondents noted four overlapping reasons for choice of business activity. The first, and most frequently cited, explanation was that enterprise activities grew out of people’s past experience. This was true when specific staff members had expertise and were able to lead business development. For example, one respondent explained that a decision to open a café was based largely on the fact that the organization’s bookkeeper was “a fabulous cook” (K24 Nova Scotia). Other businesses emerged out of the collective experience of people living with mental illness. One respondent explained why his organization had started a bicycle repair business:
People used to ride their bikes in the middle of the winter, and I’d often say to them: ‘why are you are doing this? It’s 30 below zero out!’ People would say: ‘look, you know we live in poverty, we can’t afford bus passes’. They had to figure out how to repair their own bikes because that was the only mode of transportation they had, so it was really just exploiting what was already existing, and giving people the opportunity to actually earn some money doing it (K06 Ontario)
Second, respondents explained that economic activities had been selected based on the identification of a business opportunity or market niche within the local economy. Sometimes organizational staff used networks to draw upon expertise and knowledge with a local business community. Third, some activities emerged from the existing programming of organizations. For example, several respondents talked about the gradual conversion of more therapeutic programs into more explicitly economic activities. A respondent in Alberta talked about the evolution of a sewing business:
We started a little sewing business. The sewing was actually a therapeutic sewing circle but the members wanted to make money so they did kind of a fee-per-piece sewing business that was eventually located at [seniors organization]. They were able to get a grant from a foundation to buy equipment such as an industrial machine (K11 Alberta)
Finally, respondents pointed to the affordability of certain business activities. Janitorial and cleaning work, for example, was understood to have relatively low start-up costs. Similarly, the availability of existing space and equipment were important influences on decision-making. Several organizations, for example, had moved into or inherited spaces (such as a bakery or a storefront) that were well suited to particular business activities.
Hiring process
While all enterprises were committed to creating employment for people with mental illness they varied in their approaches to hiring workers, reflecting differences of opinion about the role of the enterprise workplace in the process of mental health recovery. Some organizations had a fairly open hiring process, where any person with a self-reported history of mental illness who expressed an interest in employment could be given an opportunity. As one respondent explained:
We don’t really have a selection process. It’s a first come, first basis. We’re here to reintegrate people with mental illness and if we start saying, “ok I’m going to select”, I put all the chances of success of the organization on my side, but what chances am I putting on their side? (K17 Quebec)
In other organizations, respondents recounted more formal assessments of applicants’ skills and ‘fit’ for positions. In these instances, respondents talked both about wanting to emulate hiring practices in ‘mainstream’ employment, and to ensure that the hiring process served the needs of the enterprise. At the same time, some acknowledged that more formal evaluations of skill and experience risked ‘creaming off’ individuals with the greatest capacity for paid work.
Some people have applied for a number of businesses over time but because of the competitive process you take the person who’s the best fit for the business. That’s one of the problems with this kind of model, is that people who have higher needs often are not the ones that are successful in the interview process (K38 Ontario)
These differences in hiring practices reflect several factors. Enterprises run by psychiatric consumer/ survivor organizations were generally more flexible and open in their hiring practices. Funding also mattered: in Quebec several enterprises had the status of Centre de Travail Adaptée and received direct funding from the provincial government to cover employees’ wages. In this context, there was less financial pressure to assess the productivity of individual workers. Last, we found evidence of hiring practices changing over time as organizations adjust the balance they strike between social and economic imperatives. Where change was evident, the trend was towards a ‘more businesslike’ orientation over time. For example:
Over time we’re wanting increasing skills, which is probably harder for people who are looking for a job. Like we’re looking for someone whose got some kind of food service experience and not coming in cold (K23 Ontario)
This trend entailed the formalization of hiring processes, the introduction of one or more interviews and work assessments, as well as the use of probationary periods of employment.
Temporary vs. permanent employment
A third variation concerned whether organizations provided permanent and/or temporary employment. Only six of the 42 organizations had an exclusive focus on temporary employment opportunities. This included two cafés, two retail storefronts, a bakery and a catering business. Respondents at these organizations emphasized the importance of building skills and work experience with a view to transitioning workers into mainstream employment. For example:
[Ourmandate] is basically to provide people with the skills that they need to earn a living, which they’re doing through the business, and to move people through … It’s not designed to be a permanent stopping place for people (K06 Ontario, emphasis added)
The other 36 organizations did not place formal limits on the length of time individuals could work at their social enterprises. Respondents recognized that some people would use enterprise employment as a steppingstone to competitive employment while other might remain at the enterprise for the remainder of their working lives. Significantly, ten of these 36 organizations had started with an explicit focus on training and transition but executive directors and managers had come to recognize that they would need to offer longer-term employment opportunities for at least some of their workers. This shift was driven principally by the recognition that some workers – particularly older workers and those living with more significant forms of mental illness – struggled in mainstream employment settings both because of challenges linked to mental health and enduring problems with employer attitudes and lack of accommodations.
We’ve had some people who moved out of the program because the intent of the program is to train them for the workforce and they’ve gone to full-time jobs or part-time jobs, but whether it’s through a relapse in their illness or whatever the case may be, they come back. The intent was to be transitional … but the reality is that a lot of them value this job and it’s an important job in the community (K01 Saskatchewan).
Respondents also recognized the broader importance of social enterprises as sites of belonging and inclusion for people who have confronted ‘high levels of social marginalization, oppression and exclusion’ in other workplaces and community settings [10 p. 39].
Wages
Significant differences also emerged around the payment of wages and stipends within social enterprises. Of the 42 organizations, 29 pay hourly wages that are typically at or above provincial minimum wage (around $10 in most provinces at the time of data collection in 2013/4). Thirteen pay stipends or ‘training allowances’ that range from $50-400 per month,
Two multi-enterprise organizations paid stipends to someworkers and minimum wage to other workers.
We’ve got to make sure that what we don’t do is pay people above the industry standard, and not pay people slave labour wages … This is something that we’ve always taken a very strong philosophical stand on. You don’t pay people training allowances and sub-minimum wages. (K06 Ontario)
The payment of minimum wage or better has implications for workers’ material well-being, but it also matters symbolically as people rebuild identities around the valued social role of paid work [10].
For organizations paying stipends and training allowances, respondents’ explanations were typically based on three interrelated logics. First, some respondents talked about different expectations for productivity in social enterprise settings as compared with mainstream work environments. This reflects an explicit highlighting of different capacities for paid work among employees with mental illness, particularly in relation to speed. For these respondents, the ability of social enterprises to accommodate varying levels of productivity and speed, and the impact of these accommodation on the organization’s bottom-line, meant it was both necessary and justifiable not to pay minimum wages:
The challenge is our folks don’t work as fast as some people who are not in the mental health community would work. And that’s not true of all of them but it can be true with a lot of people so it’s very difficult to set like a payment per hour if it’s dependent on you achieving a certain speed (K31, Ontario)
In addition, respondents pointed to disability/welfare regulations and the limits placed on earned income as a factor that constrained what people could receive.
In Canada, earned income exemptions are determined provincially and there are significant variations in howmuch you can earn before money is deducted from your income support. In British Columbia, for example, you can currently earn up to $800 per month without penalty. In Nova Scotia, you can currently earn $150 per month without penalty. Above this amount, 70 percent of your wages are deducted from your income assistance.
Respondents on both sides of this issue had strong opinions about minimum wage as a defining characteristic of social enterprise employment. Their opinions reflect varying perspectives on the meaning of paid work in relation to mental health recovery, but they are also shaped by budgetary challenges and the balance different organizations attempt to strike between social and economic priorities in their ongoing operation. While it is important to acknowledge the financial challenges that these (and the vast majority of other) social enterprises confront [20, 27], efforts to value the labour power of people with mental illness and improve their material circumstances are severely compromised by rates and forms of remuneration that fall below minimum wage.
Among the 42 organizations, 24 offer part-time positions exclusively, while 18 offer a combination of part-time and full-time positions. As we discuss below, this part-time focus is partly a feature of the accommodations enterprises offer with respect to flexible scheduling and capacity for work. At an organizational level, the part-time focus reflects a common commitment to maximize the number of job opportunities available for workers with mental illness. As one respondent commented:
If there’s a job that somebody can do in five hours and get it all done, or we can split it in two and have somebody take three and somebody take three, we prefer to do that just to try and offer the most opportunity to the most number of people we can (K03 Ontario)
While part-time hours were the norm in most enterprises, the number of hours assigned to individual workers varied significantly and organizations had adopted different systems to allocate hours based on some combination of skill level, seniority and/or merit. Again, these systems reflect a balance struck between the business needs of the enterprise and the aspirations of individual workers. As one respondent noted, “for scheduling sometimes, you have to understand who you can rely on and who [you] really can’t” K28, Nova Scotia). Differences in the hours available to individual workers could sometimes create tensions with management. The director of a cleaning enterprise explained that extra shifts were assigned on the basis of demonstrated merit over time, but this did not always sit well with newer workers:
The most recent case has been somebody leaving. [The manager] explained to them, “this is part-time work, you got to go through your merit to create more opportunity” but they said, “well you didn’t give me enough hours” so they left but we told them coming in, it’s not going to be a lot of hours (K13 Ontario)
At the same time, the overall number of hours of work available was determined by demand for an enterprise’s goods and/or services, and this meant pressure on managers to ensure sufficient demand to maintain and/or expand the available hours of work.
Work accommodations
Existing research has identified the provision of work accommodations and natural supports as a key factor in the success of social enterprise in creating sustainable employment for workers with mental ill health [9, 11]. At the same time, these studies call for additional work across a broader range of enterprises to better understand the design and practical enactment of these accommodations and supports. In this research, key informant interviews allowed us to examine similarities and differences in accommodation and support that reflect contextual variations across more than 40 different organizations.
Flexibility
In a recent survey of workers at social businesses, Villotti et al identify “the crucial role played by schedule flexibility and training in helping people with mental illness to maintain employment” [9 p. 16]. The theme of flexibility was also central to our respondents’ discussions of accommodation, with schedule flexibility identified as the single most cited form of accommodation (explicitly identified by 40 of 42 organizations). Flexibility in scheduling helped to accommodate several issues, including variations in mental and physical health, health care needs and appointments, the impact of medications, as well as limitations on hours resulting from disability benefits.
While schedule flexibility was the most commonly cited accommodation, there were marked variations among enterprises with respect to the degree of flexibility offered. Some enterprises, for example, allowed people to work as little as one or two hours a week. For example:
If they said, “I can work 2 hours this week, that’s all I can work” then we say, “Okay”. And we have to fill in, then it’s our problem, then we have to figure out how to fill in the rest of the space. (K08 Ontario)
As this statement suggests, a high degree of schedule flexibility comes at a cost to the organization in the sense that managers must find ways to fill the schedule. A manager at an Ontario-based cleaning enterprise described the challenge of scheduling as ‘nightmarish’ (K14, Quebec). As we noted above, one consequence of this scheduling flexibility was that managers repeatedly spoke of the importance of having others workers on staff who had the capacity to pick up extra hours at short notice.
For other organizations, schedule flexibility was limited by internally or externally imposed minimum requirements. In Quebec, enterprises that received funding for wages from Emploi Quebec required a minimum of twenty hours per week. In other instances, organizations had their own minimum hour requirements, which were linked to the business needs of the enterprise and/or to an organizational philosophy that a minimum number of hours demonstrated readiness for employment. For example:
The minimum is 12 hours per week. You know, we’d expect a client to be able to participate at that level and if it is less than that maybe there are not ready for [the business]. Maybe they need to consider other types of involvement in the community (K36 Ontario)
Again, differences in approach to accommodations reflect broader institutional arrangements, as well as organizational viewpoints on how, when and under what conditions paid employment can or should become part of the process of recovery.
In addition to scheduling, enterprises varied in the provision of other forms of flexibility. Respondents from roughly three quarters (29 of 42) of the organizations identified work task flexibility as a form of accommodation. This entailed a process of negotiation where managers worked to identify what tasks and activities were well suited to different employees. As one respondent emphasized: “we adapt the work to the worker, not the worker to the work” (K02 Quebec). This strategy required willingness to split up and reassign work tasks to different employees. Respondents also emphasized the importance of moving people between different jobs (and between different enterprises in larger organizations) based on interest, ability and skill-level. At the same time, work task flexibility was balanced against the operational needs of the enterprises. As the manager of a café explained:
At [the café] I’d say we get more people who tend to be on heavy medication and that can be really challenging cause it does slow things down and we have to get customers served. It’s always balancing and trying to have people who are at the front of the house who can produce and get things happening and umm and maybe someone who is really struggling can do the dish washing but they can’t be on the cash (K23 Ontario)
Here, finding a place for employees with differing capacities for work needs to be balanced against the demands and expectations of café clientele. In this context, the balance is struck through the assignment of different workers to tasks in the front and back of the café.
Pace of work was a third focus of flexibility. Respondents from approximately half of the organizations (19/42) talked about the need to adjust expectations about how fast people could complete work tasks. For example, a clothing manufacturer in Quebec talked about the importance of recognizing the impact of medication on pace of work:
When [people] get to our program they have been on medication on average about 10 to 15 years so it does have impacts and it shows in their motor skills and everything else … So you have to take all these things into consideration (K17 Quebec)
Previous research has shown that managerial efforts to control (and intensify) the pace of work in ‘mainstream’ manufacturing and service employment represents a particular problem for workers with disabilities, including those with mental ill health [29]. A willingness to recognize and accommodate different speeds of work is thus critical to valuing workers and ensuring stable employment. Moreover, several of the respondents explicitly noted that a slower pace of work did not equate with poorer performance. For example, the manager of cleaning company explained: “Our position has always been our employees might take a little bit more time but the job will be done just as well” (K19, Ontario).
Finally, roughly one third of respondents (13/42) mentioned the need to be attentive to people’s comfort with social interaction in the workplace. This relates partly to the work tasks theme above, in that some people were uncomfortable working in positions that involved customer interaction. However, respondents also talked about the need to give people ways to limit social interactions with co-workers. As one respondent commented: “We’re very understanding when people aren’t having a good day. They need space. They want to work alone versus want to work in a group” (K04 Ontario).
Security
Respondents at the vast majority of enterprises (40 of 42) also identified job security as a critical consideration. This was true for short-term absences from work if someone was having a ‘bad day’ as well as longer-term absences prompted by fluctuations in workers’ mental health. For short-term absences, the vast majority of respondents were accepting of even last-minute cancellations of shifts providing people called in to let managers know of their absence. As one respondent commented:
Everyone has a schedule that they agree to work umm part of the supportive environment is they know if they’re having a really bad day, they can call in and, and book it off and not be penalized for that, and they can be honest (K03 Ontario)
As this statement suggests, the willingness to accommodate short-term absences allows people to be open about why they cannot work. As another respondent commented: “we allow people that space where they don’t have to hide it and they don’t have to apologize for it (K26 Ontario). This emphasis on openness and shared understanding stands in contrast to reported experiences in mainstream workplaces people may feel compelled to conceal mental illness and attempt to pass as ‘normal’ [30, 31].
However, organizations differed in how they dealt with workers who did not provide notice in advance of missing work. For some, their mandates meant accepting a variety of behaviours, including chronic absenteeism, which other employers would not normally tolerate. This was true of consumer/survivor-led enterprises, as well some smaller service-led organizations. Others had instituted disciplinary policies that meant people could lose hours/shifts if they did not provide some notice for an absence, and still others indicated that workers would be let go for repeated absences without notification. These were typically the same organizations that required workers to commit to a minimum number of hours.
With respect to long-term job security, many respondents indicated that they would hold jobs for people if they become physically or mentally unwell, or are dealing with other challenges. The manager of café explained that this was one of the most common accommodation requests he deals with:
I have one fellow right now and he’s working on his medication and he’ll come back and we pick up from where we left off. I think that’s one of the benefits for us that people can slide in and slide out with still their self-respect (K29 Nova Scotia)
There was also variation in the degree and nature of long-term security. Most enterprises guaranteed the same positions and hours when people returned. A smaller number guaranteed employment on return but respondents explained that people returning from lengthy absences might start with fewer hours and could earn additional shifts over time. This approach was based partly on an assessment of whether someone felt well enough to return to their previous work schedule as well an attempt to balance the needs of the individual worker against the scheduling needs of the enterprise and the hours assigned to other workers.
(Natural) Supports
A third form of accommodation centered on the provision of on-the-job support to people, with respondents from some 24 organizations identifying a range of different supportive practices. These were underlain by an emphasis on being aware of how individual employees were doing, and mentoring and supporting them if they encountered difficulties. For example, the manager of a food production enterprise in Quebec talked about the importance of encouraging people to come into work even if they are not feeling especially productive:
For us, it is very important to preserve their employment, preserve their stability. So if someone is ill or not doing well, I always tell them, come work and we’ll take it slow and we’ll take you as is (K07 Quebec)
Several respondents talked about adjusting staffing ratios to reflect the varying capacities of workers and the demands of different work tasks and settings. One manager in Ontario said that although their retail work was normally performed alone, she would assign support staff to help if someone was having a ‘bad day’. Similarly, the manager of a catering company in British Columbia said that they would increase the ratio of support staff to workers for larger, high-pressure catering events:
We try not to put more pressure on than they’re able to handle. So, for example, with catering if it’s a big event, then the ratio, you know we might not have only the manager but the crew leader as well so that there’s more stability and employees know that there are plenty of people who can support them (K15 British Columbia)
As these examples make clear, strategies to support people on the job rely on the availability of other people – support staff, co-workers, etc – to encourage and mentor people in the workplace. By necessity, such strategies are resource-intensive (e.g., increasing the number of staff for a particular job) but they work to sustain individuals’ attachment to employment and to the social, psychological and economic benefits it provides.
Finally, managers and directors at eleven organizations identified the importance of providing supports beyond the workplace. These respondents argued that people’s capacity to engage in paid work and to succeed in social enterprises workplaces was directly impacted by challenges in other spheres of everyday life including housing, poverty, disability benefits, and transportation. For example, the director of recycling business talked about the importance of advocating for workers who faced problems with the provincial social welfare system:
We’ve got a very connected relationship with our … social services [office] so that people you know will receive their benefits or if something happens and they can’t work anymore that they get they get their benefits right away (K10 Newfoundland)
This type of broader advocacy work was more common among consumer-survivor businesses and some service-led enterprises. Respondents argued that these efforts to support people beyond the workplace contributed to sustainable employment for individuals while at the same time helping to produce a more stable and consistent workforce for the social enterprise. In service-led organizations, this type of assistance was typically provided by non-disabled support workers, while in consumer-led organizations, informal and formal peer-support was common.
Discussion and conclusions
The focus of this paper has been on understanding the organizational contexts and constraints that shape social enterprise employment for people with mental ill health. While there has been a growing academic interest in the potential of such business to create accommodating and sustainable employment for this population, much existing work has focused on documenting the experiences of individual workers. The present study adds to existing scholarship by capturing the knowledge and opinions of managers and directors of social enterprises. As the analysis shows, these respondents offer insights into the multiple factors that influence the evolving nature of enterprise workplaces, the types of employment provided to workers, and the design and implementation of work accommodations and supports.
There are a number of limitations to the current study. First, the study relies exclusively on the perspective of enterprise directors and managers, and does not include the views of enterprise workers. Although we did interview workers in the larger study, the limits of a single paper made it difficult to compare and contrast the experiences and opinions of both groups. The decision to focus on managers and directors was influenced by calls within the literature to include other stakeholders beyond workers. Second, the research relies on single interviews rather than multiple points of contact and data collection so that it is difficult to look at change over time. Several other studies have pointed to the need for longitudinal research. In qualitative terms, the use of ethnography or participant observation could provide valuable insight into the daily operations of social enterprises, and the ways in which accommodations are implemented and negotiated in practice. However, our interviews with directors and managers did offer an opportunity to trace back the development of enterprises, and to track some changes in both their organizational objectives and day-to-day operations. Finally, while we were motivated in our research to capture something of the diversity of social enterprises that exist for people with mental ill health, we recognize that our sample may not encompass the entire range of organizational forms that currently exist. For example, our sample did not include worker cooperatives that may offer an important alternative model in which business decisions are made collectively [Gibson-Graham]. We also did not find any social firms that employed a mix of people with and without mental illness as co-workers, a fact that speaks to the largely separate nature of these workplaces.
Notwithstanding these limitations, our research helps to identify similarities and differences in the ways that social enterprises approach the objective of creating employment for people with mental ill health. While there are strong similarities in terms of organizational mandate to create meaningful employment there are also important variations between enterprises. These include variations in size, economic activity, and organizational structure. They include differences in terms of how many hours people work, what they are paid, how they are accommodated, and whether organizations consider themselves to be long-term or temporary employers.
These variations emerge from the specific economic and geographical environments in which enterprises are embedded, and they hold important implications for the goodness of fit between the types of employment on offer and the aspirations of individual workers [33]. For example, enterprises that provide transitional employment can be understood as sites in which people’s capacity for paid work is augmented to the point at which they are able to move into mainstream work. This model assumes that mainstream workplaces will provide appropriate employment and accommodation for such workers. By contrast, enterprises offering permanent employment operate from a position that at least some workers will not move into mainstream work as the demands of such workplaces remain irreconcilable with the abilities and capacities of workers with mental illness. Our findings also shed light on the difficult realities that many executive directors and managers confront in the pursuit of their organizational mandates: barriers in the mainstream economy continue to inhibit workers’ transition into mainstream workplaces and workers who stay at social enterprises remain ensnared in material poverty. Confronting these realities, organizational staff attempt to strike a balance between social and economic priorities – particularly with regard to wages and hours – in their ongoing operation. At the same time, our analysis shows that the balance between social and economic priorities is dynamic, changing in response to new pressures and opportunities. For example, several organizations had instituted more formalized hiring procedures that emphasized the value of previous experience and training. This shift, reflecting a broader trend towards professionalization in the non-profit sector [34], has an immediately negative impact on some people’s chances of finding work (e.g., those in the early stages of recovery, as well as those with fewer skills and more significant forms of mental illness) [25].
Understanding the range of organizational contexts and constraints is important for thinking critically about future social enterprise development, and the capacity of enterprises to create employment that is meaningful, flexible, secure and adequately remunerated. Such considerations also connect to a broader question about the extent to which the social enterprises we have examined here can be understood to offer work opportunities that are genuinely different from those available in the for-profit economy [20].
With respect to meaningful employment, finding and keeping any kind of paid work might be understood as a significant source of meaningful activity and the basis for an improved sense of self-identity. This reflects the enduring barriers that people with significant mental illness confront in mainstream labour markets, and the degree to which participation in wage labour is positioned in contemporary capitalist societies as a key marker of what it means to be a ‘normal’, ‘independent’ adult [35, 36]. At the same time, some respondents did reflect critically on the narrow range of low-skill employment provided within social enterprises. In a previous study Williams et al. found that some workers at a janitorial enterprise were ambivalent about aspects of the cleaning work and wanted something better [9]. Finding ways to expand the range of business activities and creating opportunities for advancement is important to enhance the meaningful nature of social enterprise employment. Yet, as we have shown here, the choice of business activity is often constrained by the particular mix of resources, skills and economic opportunities and constraints that organizations confront.
With respect to the issue of flexibility and security, our findings suggest that social enterprises do provide something ‘genuinely different’ from many mainstreams workplaces. This difference is embodied in efforts to create jobs suited to the capacities of a diverse population of people with mental illness, the provision a broad range of workplace accommodations, and the fostering of open and supportive workplace cultures. The fact that many respondents explicitly emphasized the provision of flexibility with respect to scheduling, work tasks and pace of work, and short and long-term job security as both reasonable and readily available differentiates these sites from many for-profit workplaces, in which accommodations remain difficult to access [37]. At the same time, our results show differences among enterprises. For example, those requiring a minimum number of hours, and imposing more stringent regulations around absences more closely approximate the norms of mainstream workplaces. By contrast, others were more interested in operating as distinct alternatives to the mainstream, and this was particularly true of consumer-survivor business. Finally, we are cautious about overstating the ‘alternative’ nature of these enterprises, given that they are, to varying degrees, subject to the market logics of the mainstream economy through relationships with suppliers, customers, landlords and funding agencies [32, 38].
With respect to wages, the material benefits of enterprise employment are significantly constrained by three factors. First, most of the jobs created within enterprises are minimum-wage jobs that in part reflect the organizational constraints noted above. Second, the majority of positions created are part-time. Third, provincial welfare regulations typically permit workers to keep only a small portion of their wages, deducting the remainder from their income assistance payments. This reflects the ‘work-first’ emphasis of neoliberal welfare policies in which paid employment is positioned as a substitute for, rather than a supplement to, public welfare supports [39]. While the wages derived by enterprise employment represent a welcome additional source of income they do not constitute a way out of poverty [23]. The fact that one quarter of the enterprises in the study did not pay minimum wage is also cause for concern. While margins are tight and organizations face significant economic pressures, the broader objective of valorizing the productive capacities of people with mental illness is compromised by a failure to reward ‘real work’ with ‘real pay’. This is especially important given the marginalization and exploitation that people with mental illness have faced in sheltered workshops [18].
Finally, the status of these enterprises as ‘separate’ workplaces deserves comment. Given the recent emphasis on (supported) employment in mainstream workplaces as a route to social inclusion and integration, these enterprises might be criticized for perpetuating the segregation of people with mental illness. However, other research has cautioned that presence in mainstream spaces does not always lead to inclusion, while separate spaces might foster feelings of belonging and acceptance [40]. An openness to, and shared experiences of, mental illness helps to foster workplaces cultures within social enterprises that are very different from many mainstream workplaces in which mental illness remains stigmatized and/or undisclosed [41]. At the same time, cafes, retail stores, caterers, landscaping companies and other enterprises created opportunities for encounters between workers and customers that highlighted the productive potential of people with mental illness [42].
Conflict of interest
None to report.