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Photo: REGIERUNGonline/Kugler Merkel holds social firms in high regard

German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the firm based in Trappenkamp in Schleswig-Holstein as part of her tour of SMEs. After being shown round the premises she was full of enthusiasm: "These are highly technical processes and state-of-the-art machines that people are operating."

The firm was an example, she said, that showed that people with disabilities made very good employees. "It is an intelligent way to do business that is good for people," said Angela Merkel. 

Giving everything

Georg Kallsen, the group's CEO, agreed with her: "People with disabilities can do quality work because they focus 100 per cent of their attention on doing the job."

The di.hako Group comprises three different social firms: di.hako.dip (founded in 2000), di.hako.tec (founded in 2003) and di.hako.log (founded in 2007). People with disabilities work alongside people without disabilities in all three firms. The company manufactures special-purpose vehicles for large-scale cleaning, real-estate maintenance and transport logistics. By its own accounts, di.hako Group has an annual turnover of some three million euros.

Photo: REGIERUNGonline/Kugler Merkel wants more firms to employ people with disabilities

When the firm began employing people with disabilities 10 years ago, it simply wanted to "do something for society", said managing director Peter Speckhahn-Hass. But in the meantime employees with disabilities had become high-performers "that we wouldn't want to be without any more." Speckhahn-Hass said it was a win-win-win situation: for employees, for society and for the firm.

Social and ecological criteria play a key role, for example, when contracts are awarded. The firm would like local authorities to take these criteria into account more when awarding their own contracts.

Highly recommended

Speckhahn-Hass had nothing he needed to ask of the German Chancellor, however. He did wish there were more businesses that said "I can do that too!", though. 

Social firms differ from other firms because they employ many times more people with severe disabilities than the five per cent they are required to hire by law. They are compensated for the additional costs of employing a high percentage of people with disabilities. 25 to 50 per cent of these firms' employees have disabilities. They are paid according to collective wage agreements or on the basis of permanent contracts with at least standard local pay. In 2005 there were 700 such firms in Germany employing 25,000 people, some 13,000 of them with disabilities.