KEY POINTS:
Next time you put out your recycling bin, spare a thought for Mario Arnerich.
Arnerich, 29, is one of the biggest winners out of a long-awaited law change that finally takes effect next Friday - the repeal of a blanket exemption from minimum wage laws which allowed a sheltered workshop to pay him just $50 for a full week's work.
The workshop's owners, Workforce Auckland, have now helped him get a job in the open market, paying just over nine times his former hourly rate.
It's not the nicest job in the world - rifling through filthy recycling bins and sorting out the cans, glass, paper and plastics for West Auckland's Rubbish Direct.
"It's a bit smelly, a bit dirty, a bit physical work," he says.
To most, it's much less pleasant than the work done in most sheltered workshops. But the money makes a difference.
"I like it because of the money," Arnerich says.
And there are other benefits.
"When I first started I weighed 10.5 or 11 stones. Now I'm 9.5," he says. "And I'm gaining some muscles."
Arnerich is one of the winners from the reform because he has only a slight intellectual disability. He can talk coherently and drives his own car to work.
At the other end of the scale is Jackie Wood. Now 49, she cannot verbalise normally and the most she has ever earned in a sheltered workshop was $2 a week.
"My daughter would never be able to get a job," says her mother, Maureen Wood, president of the IHC's West-Central Auckland branch.
In between these extremes, about 6000 other disabled people with varying ability levels have faced an uncertain future ever since the Government announced its decision to apply the minimum wage to sheltered workshops back in 2001.
In 2005, Abilities Group manager Peter Fraher warned his 80 North Shore disabled workers that he could not guarantee their jobs if the proposed law went through.
But the big national disability groups - IHC (formerly Intellectually Handicapped Children), CCS (once the Crippled Children Society) and DPA (Disabled Persons Assembly) - all pushed strongly for the change on the basis that, as Wood puts it: "Everybody is equal, and if people are doing the same job they need to get the same pay."
The bill passed in March this year, supported by all parties except National and Act - and National's shadow minister for disability issues, Paul Hutchison, says his party would not reverse the reform.
"I guess our major concern with the situation has been the speed of the transition and the fact that Labour has been impractical about such things as effective marginal tax rates," he says.
By this week, one week before D-day, the number of disabled people employed in what are now called "business enterprises" had plunged from 6000 to 1200.
Both IHC, which accounted for about half of the original total, and CCS have stopped employing anyone below the minimum wage.
Despite their early fears, most other sheltered workshops including Fraher's Abilities Group will carry on much as they were. The new law allows them to pay less than the minimum wage to individuals assessed by the Labour Department as being "limited by a disability" - with the wage each worker gets based on his or her individual productivity.
The reform flows out of a much broader philosophy of "inclusion.".
As CCS puts it in a recent submission, the vision is a society where disabled people "live, learn, laugh and love and contribute alongside everybody else - they are not segregated within their local community".
Instead of forcing disabled people to paint as negative a picture as possible to maximise welfare and health funding, CCS advocates local facilitators to ask what individuals want to do and then help them to do it.
"Paid work is practical for more people than any of us imagine, and it's what people want," says CCS policy manager Paul Gibson.
He says employers like Rubbish Direct who take on a disabled worker gain not just a dedicated employee but a spinoff "engaging and supportive work culture".
So CCS has closed its sub-minimum-wage gardens, and IHC has ended all its commercial contracts. Instead, both now concentrate on finding jobs for their members in the open market, and organising what they call "community participation" for everyone else.
There have been some human casualties.. When the IHC ended their final contracts at their New Lynn centre a couple of months ago, 45-year-old Stephen Homfeld didn't want to take up the new activities that were offered, such as walking and shopping.
"IHC cancelled all their contracts. He's been at home ever since. There's nothing to do down there," says his mother Margaret Homfeld, 79.
"He's a very strong young man and he's keen to work. There are three neighbours who want their lawns done and he's doing that for $20 each. But I'd rather he had something more concrete and he knew he had to be there every day."
Margaret Castle, 33, still attends the New Lynn centre, now known as IDEA Services (for Intellectual Disability Empowerment in Action), but struggles to recall what she does there.
She remembers packing pegs and nails. But asked what she does now, she replies: "Nothing. I do cleaning up and stuff."
With help from centre staff, she eventually remembers that she also goes for walks, shops at Lynnmall, practises crossing the road safely, goes swimming, attends art and literacy classes, and learns sign language for the sake of another client, who is deaf.
On the other hand, the centre now puts more effort into finding work for its clients in the outside world.
Bryan Goldsbury, 27, has been learning work skills such as personal grooming, getting up in the mornings and looking in the papers for jobs. He starts a two-week work experience trial on Monday cleaning wheelchairs and other equipment for supplier Accessable.
Another client, Michael, 44, has gone from earning $66 a fortnight in a now-closed IHC furniture shop to $20 an hour as a half-time office assistant in a city sharebroking firm. He collects the mail, restocks the soap and the office fridges, does the banking, photocopying and the coffee run.
"This morning I got out $1000 to fix a shoe," he says. The sharebroker's shoe repair cost only $10, but the broker wanted the other $990 in cash.
Michael has gone off the invalid's benefit and can afford to build his DVD collection.
Achieving breakthroughs like Michael's is hard, slow work. Out of 18 people in the New Lynn workshop at the start of this year, area manager Leopoldo Aguirre says only two or three have got outside jobs so far.
At Avalon Inc, a workshop on a kiwifruit orchard which supports 130 mainly intellectually disabled people outside Tauranga, chief executive Sarah Davey says only about five a year get outside jobs.
Avalon has doubled its turnover by renegotiating contracts so that it can pay its workers at individually assessed rates between $1.70 and $13.50 an hour, but it has had to cut employees from 130 to 53. The remaining 77 are now in unpaid activities including sport, voluntary work in parks and reserves, looking after the elderly and conservation work.
She is surprised that those who have missed out on paid work still appear to be happy, although "most of them would want employment in some way, shape or form".
On the North Shore, Fraher has kept all of what are now almost 100 jobs at Abilities by getting every individual's fair wages assessed at between $1.25 and $11.25 an hour.
At the Auckland Protected Employment Trust in Papatoetoe, manager Gary Olney has kept 90 of his 120 disabled workers employed at the cost of trebling his wage bill. A further 21 have moved into community participation.
In Mt Eden, the Disabled Citizens Society has kept all of its 67 workers in paid work. And at Workforce Auckland, with 140 workers in workshops at Mangere and Henderson, contracts have been renegotiated to cover modest wage increases.
Chief executive Joy Ottaway says fair wages for a third of the workers were assessed as below the agency's minimum of $50 a week, so they have stayed on that minimum.
Another third were assessed at between $50 and $64.50. Ottaway says that in that range it doesn't pay to take a wage increase because of taxation, so most people in that range have legally declined to accept the rise offered.
The remaining third were assessed at $65 and above and have accepted their pay increases.
Hilda Ngataki, 51, who cleans and re-packs Air New Zealand headsets, has seen her pay leap from $50 a week to more than three times that.
"It helps with a few bills. I can buy bits and pieces," she says.
Colleague Colin Wi, 56, has seen his pay multiply three-and-a-half times and can now afford nights out in town.
Kerry Clark, 37, who packs drinks into six-pack cartons, has almost trebled his pay.
Kitchenhand Chris Bohm, 38, was already above $50 before the change and has gone up by another third.
More importantly, Workforce Auckland now gives all its workers a choice. It has established a "single door" where new arrivals are helped to make "career plans" and can aim for either work in the outside world, work inside the sheltered workshop or unpaid voluntary work, training or other community activities.
Its numbers placed in outside jobs, such as Arnerich at Rubbish Direct, increased by 20 per cent to 293 in the year to June.
There are still problems, such as the tax anomaly caused by an exemption from income tax for earnings up to $50 "in therapeutic activities in a sheltered workshop". If the person earns $50.01, the whole lot becomes taxable.
Ministry of Social Development contracts manager Gordon Pryde concedes: "The effect is that there is a small window where people in sheltered workshops earning between $50 and $64 per week are worse off financially than if they earned $50 tax-free.
"This provision is recognised as being an anomaly but is not presently under active consideration."
The welfare system creates another obstacle because most disabled people receive the invalid's benefit, which is only for people who "must not be able to regularly work 15 hours or more per week in open employment".
A caretaker at an Auckland apartment block, Philip Charlton, won a legal breakthrough in a 2005 High Court case which established that he was still in "sheltered employment" because his employer made concessions to accommodate his disability, such as giving him a place where he could rest when he needed to.
Legally, this means that anybody whose working conditions are modified because of their disability can now work more than 15 hours a week and still receive a partial invalid's benefit - making it much easier to go back to the full benefit if their health deteriorates.
Pryde says the Ministry of Social Development "is currently considering how people with ill health and disabled people can be better supported to work to the extent that they are able".
