Barriers to employment participation for people with disabilities : a Maltese perspective

Abstract

The disability sector is among the priorities of the Maltese government. This is because the Maltese employment rate of people with disabilities is very low, when compared to the rest of Europe. This study investigates what types of barriers Maltese people with disabilities, encounter when they are either trying to join the labour market or securing their employment. Given that, research on the disability sector is still preliminary, a case study approach consisting of a one-to-one interview, in the form of a questionnaire and a focus group were drawn up. In all, this study is based on the experience of fourteen disabled individuals, distributed in ten one-one interviews and four respondents took part in a focus group. Overall the responses extracted from the focus group supported the data obtained from the interviews. The findings suggest that the Maltese labour market is still endowed with a number of barriers and on the whole, these barriers are in line with the barriers present in the literature, with an exception of a few. The major barrier resulted to be the attitudes of Maltese people in general, especially the employers` attitudes to engage people with disability within their workforce. At the end of this dissertation, a number of policy recommendations to enhance the employment rate of people with disabilities in Malta were outlined.