By Suzanne Wilson
| (6/6/97) -- At two company-wide meetings last winter, Richard Carlson, director of operations at Chartpak in Leeds, talked about a new group of people that would soon be starting work |
| "We talked about what these people would be doing and the types of personalities involved -- that some would be physically and mentally handicapped. The bottom line is that I said I didn't want any teasing or pointing," he recalls. Everyone has feelings, he said, and Carlson didn't want any of the newcomers to get needlessly hurt. |
| The new group included six people from Riverside Industries Inc., the Easthampton agency that provides services for the mentally retarded. They would be working side-by-side with an additional 13 people without disabilities that Riverside hired, packaging a new arts and crafts product. Each unit contains two thin sheets, called transfers, that are stenciled with pictures. The decorative images can be pressed onto such items as coffee mugs, lamps or flower pots. The workers job would be to place them in plastic bags and then box the finished products for shipping. |
| Carlson was optimistic from the start that things would work out. Sheila Coutch of Easthampton, though, remembers feeling a little apprehensive about coming to Chartpak. She is 45, and had previously been a production worker at Riverside and had held a couple of temporary community jobs. "It was scary," she says, recalling her first days at Chartpak. But her nervousness passed quickly and she soon found lots to like. "They've got hot chocolate here," she says, "and different kinds of coffee. You can get vanilla coffee for 50 cents." |
| She was sitting at one of the round tables in the lunchroom. Next to her was her friend Anne Howard of Northampton, also from Riverside. Everything here is "clean and neat and beautiful," Howard said, gesturing toward the big windows that look outside. |
| As they stood to go back to work, Howard noticed that her friend's flowered skirt was a little uneven in back. She tugged gently at the hem and straightened it out so that it would look just right and then the two of them walked back to the production area. |
| Seated side by side, they resumed their task: Pick up two transfers, slip them into a plastic bag; add the wood popsicle stick that is used for pressing the image; tear the bag off the roll; and add the bag to the pile of completed units. "It was hard to learn," Howard said, but she's got the hang of it now. |
| The relationships |
| THE RELATIONSHIP between the company and the agency goes back more than a year, when a Riverside staff person first spoke with company officials about employment possibilities for the agency's clients. Nothing panned out then, but Carlson remembered that discussion months later when he was faced with a problem to solve. Delta Technical Coding, a California-based company that sells the line of transfers being made at Chartpak, no longer wanted to handle the job of packaging them; Chartpak wasn't set up to handle it either. He would need a crew of people who could work indefinitely, for a year or more. |
| Carlson called Riverside in part because he had some previous experience working with mentally retarded employees at a plastics company he ran in Leominster. Most of those workers, he found, were diligent, highly productive and able to work an eight-hour day at the kind of repetitive task many people spurn. His one hesitation was that in Leominster he'd had a few people with "severe emotional problems and that was hard for me to handle. I said (to Riverside), 'Look, I want people who are able to take care of themselves.' " |
| Carlson liked the idea that Riverside would bring in its own people to oversee the project and handle any personnel problems; that would keep Chartpak's managerial costs down. And finally, he says, this was "a way for us to do something for people who don't have the same opportunities as the rest of us. It's not every day we can do something like that." |
| The group remains employees of Riverside. They are paid according to how much they produce out of money paid by Chartpak to Riverside. Riverside is currently billing about $5,000 a week, says its president, Ron Bittel |
| They started work in January and Carlson's assessment so far is positive. "They are super workers -- we're getting no mistakes -- and the staff is great," he says. The group is currently producing more than 10,000 units a day. So pleased is Carlson that he's talking with Riverside about adding more people for additional projects. "I'd expand what we have if we can," he says. |
| The working crew |
| The crew works at several tables in one section of a big production area. The process begins with the bagging task that Howard, Coutch and several others perform. After the transfers are bagged, the packages are stapled and packed in cartons for shipping by others in the Riverside group. |
| The job of figuring out how to organize the work project fell in part to David Peake-Jones, who works as a job coach and an employment specialist for Riverside. Wearing a carpenter's apron, a pencil cocked behind one ear, Peake-Jones circulates among the crew, to keep the work flowing and to help solve problems as they come up. "A lot of what I do is try to figure out how to make it all work efficiently," he says. He and a second employee from Riverside will continue to work alongside the group at Chartpak as long as they are there. |
| Peake-Jones came out to Chartpak several days before production was due to start. He was shown the area the people would work in, and the materials they would be using. Right away, he decided that he wanted to come up with a mechanism to make it easier for his workers to handle the rolls of plastic bags. That task went to James Mularski, a staffer at Riverside who designed and built dispensers that turn with a handle. "These help people immeasurably," says Peake-Jones. He also decided to organize people in clusters rather than seat them in one long production line so that quality control could be done at a couple of places along the way. |
| All of those who came to Chartpak were part of Riverside's Supported Employment Training program that is geared toward preparing people for community jobs. "We wanted people who had shown an ability to be productive, to come to work consistently and to work through the day," says Peake-Jones. |
| It took most of them only about half a day to master the mechanics, says Peake-Jones. "However, retraining and refocusing goes on on a daily basis," he adds, citing the example of the popsicle sticks. The baggers must check each one they pick up and reject any that are broken or severely marred; some people, says Peake-Jones, need to be reminded to pay attention to that. |
| Jana Moe, a jobs program manager at Riverside who has been involved with the Chartpak effort, credits the company's leadership with doing a good job of laying the necessary groundwork. "I've seen instances where that didn't happen, where people didn't know ahead of time what was happening," she says. The result, she says, is misunderstandings and awkward interactions that could have been avoided. For example, even a little advice such as talking to people about ways to ease communication with a handicapped person who has trouble speaking can ease the way. |
| Chartpak 'enclave' |
| In social service jargon, the Chartpak group is what is called an "enclave" and it is currently the only one of its kind in Hampshire County. What it means is that the group combines people with disabilities with what are called "competitive employees" also hired by Riverside. The agency currently has about 25 such employees. |
| The enclave is, essentially, a new twist on an old idea. Historically, groups of handicapped people began working in manufacturing settings many years ago. The emphasis gradually shifted to trying to find more individual placements, in part to encourage a more natural "blending in" between handicapped and non-handicapped workers. However, finding those jobs has been an uphill struggle all along. "The individual placement is still our preference -- but the practicalities are steep," says Ron Bittel. The jobs are hard to come by and sending one job coach to work with one person at a job site is also expensive. |
| The enclave approach tackles several problems. Bringing in a group that arrives at the workplace already made up of both handicapped and non-handicapped people means that the disability "isn't the front and center issue," says Jana Moe. "It doesn't spotlight it so much." She has found that being part of an integrated work crew can help people improve their problem-solving skills. She has noticed that one man, by watching co-workers without disabilities, has figured out what to do when he runs into a snag using his equipment. |
| There has also been some interaction between Chartpak employees and the folks from Riverside. "I had never really been around handicapped people before," says Joyce Wagner of Leeds, who has worked as a machine operator at Chartpak for eight years. That changed when Sheila Coutch said hi one day as she walked past Wagner's workstation on her way to the lunchroom. Wagner said hi back. "She brought me an apple the next day. And a pear the next day," Wagner recalls. Now Coutch regularly comes over to chat and get a hug. Wagner has invited her to come out to her house on a weekend afternoon this summer as soon as the weather gets nice. |
| "She's going to let me know when," says Coutch. "I can take pictures of her garden and have ice tea. She's a very nice person." Wagner says the arrangement has been good for her, and good for Chartpak. "I think it's brought out the goodness in all of us." |
| With the timetable at Chartpak an open-ended one, no one is sure exactly how long the Riverside group will stay, or where they'll be working next. Sheila Coutch, though, has not one shred of doubt about how long she would like this job to last. "I want to keep on here," she says. "Forever and ever." |
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