Like many people with autism, Harrison Mullinax, a pale, redheaded 18-year-old with a serious expression, speaks in a
monotonous, halting voice and sometimes struggles to concentrate on tasks.
Unlike most who are autistic, he now has a real job.
Mr. Mullinax works eight hours a day at a new
Walgreen Co. distribution center, where he wields a bar-code scanner,
checking in boxes of merchandise bound for the company's drugstores. From his
paycheck, he tithes to his church and sometimes treats his mother to dinner at
Kenny's, a local buffet restaurant.
An innovative program at the distribution center is offering
jobs to people with mental and physical disabilities of a nature that has
frequently deemed them "unemployable," while saving Walgreen money through
automation.
"It answered a prayer," says Mr. Mullinax's mother, Vikki, who
gets him up for work at 5 each morning, before sending him off to the bus for
work. "It's given us the hope that at some point Harrison can live with minimal
assistance."
A number of large employers, such as
McDonald's Corp. and
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., recruit people with disabilities to be cashiers,
maintenance workers or store greeters. At
Home Depot Inc., developmentally disabled workers stock shelves, clean
displays and help customers find items. Home Depot has been working with a
nonprofit organization called Ken's Kids, which was formed a decade ago by a
group of parents seeking employment opportunities for their young-adult
children, and has placed more than 100 people in 54 stores. In addition, smaller
businesses around the nation have made a goal of employing workers passed over
by other companies.
Still, executives at Walgreen and the social-services agencies
working with it believe the company's program has a larger number of disabled
employees, doing more-sophisticated work, than is typically available to people
with mental and physical challenges.
Mr. Mullinax, like many of Walgreen's employees with
disabilities, learned his job in a large metal-clad shed 15 minutes down the
road from the distribution center. There, trainees learn how to work in one of
three departments: "case check-in," where workers initially receive merchandise;
"de-trash," where they unpack the goods; and "picking," where they sort the
products into tubs based on individual store orders.
The distribution center opened in January at a cost of $175
million. It currently employs 264 people, more than 40% of whom have various
disabilities, and it is 20% more efficient than the company's older facilities.
On some days, disabled employees are its most productive workers.
"One thing we found is they can all do the job," says Randy
Lewis, a senior vice president of distribution and logistics at Walgreen, which
is based in Deerfield, Ill. "What surprised us is the environment that it's
created. It's a building where everybody helps each other out."
When they make the transition to the distribution center,
disabled employees at first have a job coach. Those needing it learn social
skills, from the importance of wearing deodorant to finding appropriate
conversation topics.
The idea began four years ago, when Mr. Lewis was evaluating
new technology that could make Walgreen's next round of distribution centers far
more automated than in the past. Mr. Lewis asked: Could Walgreen make the work
simple enough to employ people with cognitive disabilities?
For him, the question was personal. His 19-year-old son,
Austin, has autism. "I'm keenly aware of the lack of opportunities for kids like
that," he says. Among people with the disability, the unemployment rate can be
as high as 95%, according to social-service agencies.
Because employing disabled people wasn't expected to affect the
distribution center's costs or efficiency, it wasn't difficult for Mr. Lewis to
persuade the Walgreen board and David Bernauer, then the company's chief
executive and now its chairman, to try the project. "The fact that we can use
disabled people for this was a great plus," Mr. Bernauer says. "It didn't move
the needle on the business decision."
As part of the program, Walgreen converted its computer
displays from lines of type to touch screens with a few icons. It persuaded
vendors to include more information in bar codes on merchandise, so that
employees wouldn't have to enter so much data themselves. It redesigned work
stations so that people don't have to stretch as far, and it added help buttons
to summon assistance. Instead of posting printed cards to remind workers about
having their bags inspected, Walgreen shows a video of someone opening a bag.
Angela Campbell, the facility's career-outreach coordinator,
suggested adding pictures to numbered work stations. In the "de-trash" area,
where workers remove merchandise from boxes and prepare it to be sorted for
individual stores, there are images of farm animals.
Ms. Campbell, who has cerebral palsy and carefully maneuvers
the building's many flights of stairs, tells employees they should feel
comfortable asking her awkward questions about why someone looks or behaves a
certain way. "I know what it's like to fight your whole life to have an employer
look past your disability," she says.
All workers are constantly monitored to track whether they're
meeting productivity goals. One day, workers with disabilities topped the
productivity list in three major departments, says Keith Scarbrough, the
distribution center's manager.
Many trainees volunteer their time to learn, sometimes spending
as much as a year without pay. Anderson County arranges transportation for many
employees to get to work. Walgreen estimates that if it reaches its goal of
employing 200 workers with disabilities, the value of the government benefits it
receives will be about $3.5 million.
Starting pay at the distribution center is $10.85 an hour,
climbing to $13.80 an hour after two years.
The disabilities of workers at the center run the gamut and
present the supervisory staff with a variety of challenges. Desiree Neff, 43,
struggles with her balance and uses a walker, her 26-year-old son and co-worker,
Troy Mayben, is legally blind. Recently, Ms. Neff wanted to learn how to operate
a forklift so she could expand her skills, but she didn't have a place to put
her walker. An engineer devised a clamp that attaches the walker to the
forklift.
In another case, managers didn't know what to do about a
disruptive employee who screamed "Hello!" every morning. Some argued that the
behavior was part of the worker's disability. But Deb Russell, the
career-outreach manager for Walgreen, reasoned, "We don't allow anyone else to
do that." She instructed workers to ignore his shouting. Within two days, she
says, he stopped.
As for Vikki Mullinax, she says now that Harrison is working,
she can spend more time with her husband and 16-year-old daughter. Harrison "has
improved tremendously," she says.
Harrison Mullinax says he has made friends, and he likes being
paid. Working at Walgreen, he says, has taught him how to offer help to others
and "not to cuss anybody out."
