Special Shops Let Disabled Make Money Old-Fashioned Way : Clients at Sheltered Workshops Earn Pay, Sense of Self-Esteem

Mark Switt, 33, pushed up his glasses, placed the hinge of a fence gate he had just assembled back on his workbench and gestured around the 20,000-square-foot production area of New Horizons in Sepulveda.

“I love working here,” said Switt, one of 225 developmentally disabled adults employed full time at the sheltered workshop, a production facility run by a nonprofit organization. “It’s not boring, and I’m happy.”

Outside the workshop, 25-year-old Kathy Nordberg maneuvered her wheelchair to a spot near the picnic tables to enjoy a bit of winter sunshine during her break. “I enjoy coming here because it means I don’t have to stay home, be bored and look at four walls,” she said. “If I stayed home, I’d probably watch TV all day long.”

New Horizons is one of a handful of sheltered workshops in the San Fernando Valley. The workshops secure contract work from industry in order to offer employment to workers like Switt and Nordberg, whose disabilities prohibit easy access to employment or rule out jobs in a conventional setting.

Escaping Monotony

The protective, closely supervised workshop environment provides employees with more than a chance to earn paychecks. For many, their sheltered workshop jobs afford an opportunity to escape an otherwise monotonous daily routine and a chance to feel like valued members of society.

“Getting them to stop working at the end of the day is sometimes difficult,” said Pam Schaefer, senior rehabilitation counselor at New Horizons. “They take their jobs seriously. And if we have a rush project, they really rally around.”

Clients, as most of the workshops prefer to call their employees, excel at performing repetitive jobs--jobs that workers in industry may balk at doing: Hand packaging, collating, sorting and mechanical assembly are common tasks at sheltered workshops.

At New Horizons, assembling at-home heart monitor kits is an ongoing project.

On a recent morning at Build Rehabilitation Industries in North Hollywood, 110 clients kept busy sorting and packaging false fingernails, among other projects.

At Nova Opportunity Center of Burbank Inc., many of the 44 clients spent a recent morning shrink-wrapping hundreds of boxes of toys.

Collating Work

At Rancho del Valle Workshop of the Crippled Children’s Society of Southern California Inc., in Woodland Hills, collating of printed materials is a frequent task for the 50 clients.

“Some clients set production goals for themselves--over and above what we set for them,” Schaefer said. She recalled one woman, in printing lot numbers on vitamin packages, who began by completing 1,000 packages a day and worked her way up to 2,000 a day within the workweek.

Prospective clients are tested to evaluate their motor skills, ability to follow directions and other capabilities. Individual goals are established and rehabilitation counselors follow them closely to assess progress. Some workshops also conduct on-the-job training.

“We teach clients socialization skills, for example, and how to focus their attention on tasks,” explained Jeff Teller, a senior rehabilitation counselor at Build Rehabilitation Industries.

Pay Varies

All clients are paid for their work, either by the piece or by the hour. Pay varies widely, depending on the job and the client’s productivity, and augments other sources of income, such as government aid.

At Build, for example, clients receive about $1.46 an hour, said Larry Miller, executive director. “But there are clients who make much more,” he said.

Payday at sheltered workshops is as exciting as at any other job, and perhaps more so. The excitement boils down to a simple fact, said Vera Switt, president of New Horizon’s auxiliary and parents’ group: “They earned it. It wasn’t given to them.”

The benefits of sheltered workshops aren’t one-sided, however, as hundreds of San Fernando Valley businesses have discovered. For them, the rewards of linking up with sheltered workshops can be philanthropic as well as economic.

“The image of a business is enhanced if it provides work for the handicapped,” said Art Grant, executive director of Nova Opportunity Center.

Contracting with sheltered workshops can also reduce the need to hire seasonal help, eliminate overtime for regular employees and trim overall fringe-benefit costs.

“There is a fixed per-unit cost here,” said Howard S. Taylor, production planner at New Horizons. “Companies don’t have the extra investment of equipment, in some cases, and they don’t have to think about overhead costs or worry about extra insurance costs.”

For some businesses, these benefits persuade management to turn over much of their work to sheltered workshops. One company farms out half its packaging business to Nova. At Build, a single company sometimes provides income up to $15,000 a month.

Some workshops provide pickup and delivery of materials and products. “When an entrepreneur comes in,” said Chuck Seley, contract procurement officer at New Horizons, “we can show him the main methods of packaging and can fill them in on the terminology.”

Rush Jobs

Sheltered workshops accept rush jobs whenever possible, as well as small orders that large commercial packaging houses may turn down.

“We have a ready work force,” said Marjorie Pierson, administrative assistant at New Horizons, “and even though our productivity may be lower than that of industry, we have a lot of hands and can get the job out.”

The Valley’s sheltered workshops, like others nationwide, are far from “mom-and-pop” operations. They have become increasingly sophisticated and efficient since the first sheltered workshop opened in Boston in 1837. And, in the wake of claims in the late 1970s that some sheltered workshops exploited their employees, the industry’s standards have toughened.

Today, the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities, a private, nonprofit organization, requires workshops to meet strict criteria to gain its approval. Workshops must also cooperate with the Department of Labor, the state Department of Rehabilitation and their own customers to ensure adequate income.

Training, Experience

Staffs at sheltered workshops now tend to be professionally trained or to have many years of experience. At some of the larger workshops, contract procurement is a full-time job, as is keeping track of contracts and client work hours. “At any given time,” said Seley of New Horizons, “we have 15 or 20 different contracts on the floor.”

The emphasis at sheltered workshops is on maintaining quality control and meeting the customers’ needs. “Our clients know that contractors are important persons,” said Schaefer of New Horizons. “They know if we send out a lousy job, we can lose business.”

Sheltered workshop officials say they don’t accept every job that is offered. “There are things we should not be involved in,” Seley said. “If someone needs rotor blades for a helicopter, say, it is probably not the job for us. If it’s not a good job for us, we make the decision not to do it.”

Loyal Customers

Concern about producing quality work and meeting customers’ requirements pays off in long-term associations with businesses. “I have been on staff 11 years,” said workshop director Barbara Sheets of Rancho del Valle, “and not a single business has left for quality-control reasons.”

When Kenneth Anderson, materials manager for Space Labs Inc. of Chatsworth, a heart monitor manufacturer, visits clients on the production line at New Horizons, he is impressed with their concern for quality.

“If I pick up a heart-monitoring kit, clients often come up to me and point out something they caught that wasn’t quite right. The clients are looking for quality; they are not waiting for supervisors to point out mistakes.”

But best of all, said Anderson, “I think they’ve cut our labor cost by two-thirds.”