The Able Disabled

For its Long Island plant Abilities, Inc. has the most unusual hiring policy in the nation. No one, from president to sweeper, can get a job unless he is so handicapped physically that he is unemployable by common industry standards. Yet Abilities is no charity. Everyone is paid the prevailing wage scale, and the company grossed $2,500,000 last year competing in the open market for electronic assembly subcontracts. In nine years it has grown from a garage with four employees (only five good arms and one good leg among them) to a modern million-dollar plant with 395 on the payroll. This week it is getting ready to open a $1,000,000 addition that will house a swimming pool and gymnasium for the workers. It will also house a division. Human Resources Foundation, that uses the factory to make scientific studies on capabilities of the disabled.

To Offer Proof. By providing the disabled with work, the company hopes to prove to other businessmen how well the handicapped can do a job. The evidence is impressive. Alex Alazraki. who was born with only stumps for arms and legs, uses the vestigial limbs to pop tiny screws into packages, punches out orders at a respectable hunt-and-peck speed on the typewriter, drives his own car to work. Murray Nemser, his backbone fused rigid by war injuries, does a full day's work estimating contract bids while stretched out on a mobile cot beside his desk. A one-armed man, using a special jig, performs a delicate soldering job. Women with arthritic-weakened wrists wind wires with the aid of an Abilities-designed machine that speeds up the job so effectively that other companies are buying it for regular workers. Other employees work in pairs, match their abilities and disabilities to the job, turn out as much as three men.

The force behind Abilities is its evangelistic president, Henry Viscardi Jr., 48, who knows firsthand the problems of cripples; he was born with stumps for legs. Until he was 25 years old, he hobbled about in cork-stuffed orthopedic boots, looking so grotesque that, he recalls, classmates dubbed him "the ape man.' Then a friend helped him get aluminum legs. Overnight he "grew" from 3 ft. 8 in. to 5 ft. 8 in., became imbued with a fervor to give the same sort of boost to other handicapped.

He turned to social work, trying to find jobs for the handicapped. But most firms were afraid to take them on because supervisors feared they might get injured on the job or not be able to do the work. To prove this was not so, he borrowed $8,000 to start Abilities, talked subcontracts out of Servomechanisms Inc. and the Sperry Gyroscope division of Sperry Rand. Now his impressive list of customers who subcontract work to Abilities includes Republic Aviation, Dictaphone Corp., Sikorsky and Bendix.

No Gimmicks. When Viscardi applied to the Insurance Co. of North America for workmen's compensation insurance to cover his employees, North America's Herbert Stellwagen said: "I was horrified. Not one of them was insurable." Nevertheless, Viscardi persuaded Stellwagen to write a policy "with no gimmicks, hedges or qualifying clauses." In nine years there have been only three reportable accidents, an amazing record that brought a 48% cut in premiums. In addition, Viscardi says that absenteeism is very low and that there is very little extra cost for medical or other special facilities. Viscardi fires almost as fast as any other employer: "There is the same proportion of loafers in wheelchairs as there is in the general population."

All of Abilities' profits (federal taxmen have ruled it a nonprofit organization) go into the Human Resources Foundation. The foundation has found, for example, that cardiac patients can do much more work than anticipated and actually improve in health in the process. In addition to publishing such findings, Viscardi writes books about the experiences of people at Abilities guaranteed to bring a lump to the throat (next one to be published in June: A Laughter in the Lonely Night). He has helped Minneapolis-Honeywell, Hughes Aircraft, Republic Steel, Sperry and Grumman Aircraft to use the skills of the handicapped; Sears, Roebuck rewrote its employment manual to include them.

Degrees of Ability. Eugene T. Turney Jr., president of Anodyne Inc., a nameplate manufacturer, was so impressed that he built a special plant in Florida to use mostly disabled workers. Other Florida businessmen, spurred on by former Governor LeRoy Collins, have started a carbon copy of Abilities called Abilities, Inc. of Florida under Viscardi's active guidance. Similar projects are under way in Japan, Australia, India, New Zealand and Canada. Viscardi estimates that more than 5,000,000 Americans who have disabilities of some kind could work, but last year fewer than 500,000 got work, and about 300,000 are added to the work force every year. Says Viscardi: "When the world finally realizes there are no disabled workers--only workers with varying degrees of ability, not disability--then Abilities, Inc. will go out of business. But it won't happen in our lifetime."

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