Kostelka: Sluggish sales of products manufactured by blind people threatens employment

Sluggish sales of products manufactured by blind people threatens employment

ORF-Series "Bürgeranwalt" (“Advocate for People”) – Broadcast of December 22th, 2007

The Viennese Workshop for blind and visually impaired people of the Louis Braille Haus has often had to fight with economic difficulties. In 2005 the establishment had to close for a short time and was taken over by the German Association for the Blind, the Arbeitsring anerkannter Blinderwerkstätten-Schlich GmbH. The Viennese Workshop for Blind People is being run as an independent society with limited liability, and it currently employs 16 disabled persons out of which 15 are fully blind and one is visually impaired. This Society closely cooperates with the ÖBER, which is the Austrian Society for Products Manufactured by the Blind, which runs other establishments in Linz and in Graz. Graz also houses the Distribution Centre and the Accounts Department.

Its wide product line offers 150 varieties of manually manufactured brooms, brushes, and paintbrushes even wickerwork. Its street brooms and hand brushes are its best-sold products. The price of these handcraft products manufactured by blind people and that can last for up to 20 years is far higher than that of a machine-made product which one can buy at a big supermarket. The business is now facing great sales difficulties. Its Distribution Centre in Graz presently stores brooms and brushes worth € 280.000. The blind employees carry on their profession with great pleasure and dedication and find in it their purpose in life.
They know that their employment is at risk because of the sales difficulties and they harbor almost no hope of finding another employment.

One of the problems of the Workshop is the lack of legal protection for the sale of its products. That is why some businesses are actually selling, under the label “made by the blind”, products that were not manufactured by blind or visually impaired people. This practice is deceiving many people and the Workshop’s trade has to bear the consequences of this fraud. Ombudsman Peter Kostelka points out that there are no specific protection clauses for the sale of products manufactured by blind people in Austria, whereas in Germany a Bill issued in 1953 protects the sale of products manufactured by blind people and imposes a legally binding label requirement, which gives the buyer as well as the seller a valid assurance that the commercial order that was addressed to blind manufacturers actually reaches them.

There are also some other factors that are worsening the situation of the Workshop. Until 2002 customers who ordered products from establishments, which mainly employed disabled people, received tax bonuses of up to 15% of the net invoice amount of the order they had placed. The customer thus paid the full price to the workshop for blind people and received in return a refund of 15% of the net invoice from Government funds, after submitting a separate application to the Federal Social Welfare Office. This complex procedure involved a lot of bureaucracy and it sometimes took up to 18 month for the so-called work bonus to be refunded. This bonus was abrogated, without being replaced, in the course of the reenactment of the Federal Act for Disabled People and neither the Federal Government nor the states have offered any adequate compensation.

The general management argued that the Workshop for Blind People did not have good prospects in the field of public procurement with their products of high quality, since the Government departments had to justify less in the following accounting controls when they awarded the contract to the cheapest supplier. Due to all this, the Government, the states and the municipalities very rarely requesting products from the Workshop for Blind People.

Ombudsman Peter Kostelka has therefore pointed out the need to properly train responsible civil servants who are in charge of government award procedures, so as to make them aware of the many possibilities that already exist for awarding contracts to protected workshops and integrative businesses, since the entry into force of the Federal Award Procedures Act of 2006. They should also be made aware that government award procedures are not exclusively based on economic criteria and the comparison of prices since social criteria and factors should also be taken into account under applicable law (§19 para 6 BVergG 2006), which is a fact that has not sufficiently been advertised among people that are presently holding influential posts in the government procurement field. The Ombudsman Board will address all the relevant political authorities, both of the Federal Government and of the states and will send them a reminder about their social responsibility when they are considering award procedures in the name of Federal Government bodies and institutions or in the name of the states and municipalities.

The Viennese Federal Social Welfare Office has already made known its intention to offer additional business support to the workshop for Blind Persons of the Louis Braille Haus.