In our country, only 1 in 4 people with disabilities who are of working age have a job today. The employment rate of this group of citizens stands at 26.9%, a percentage that is very far from the employability rate of the general population, which reaches 66.3% (that is, about 40 points above ), according to Report 8 of the Observatory on Disability and the Labor Market of the ONCE Foundation, Odismet.
José Manuel Piñán, 35 years old and from A Coruña, and Xiana Moreira, a 29-year-old from Pontevedra, have been able to start a working relationship thanks to an agreement between DOWN ESPAÑA and Repsol to incorporate people with disabilities into their stations of service.
The experience, so far, is bringing them great satisfaction. José Manuel confesses that he feels happy doing his job. “I like to strive to do things well,” he explains. The first day, inevitably, he felt a little nervous about having to start in a new and unknown place for him, but now he is much more confident in his abilities to carry out all the tasks. Every day I check the store, I check that all the products are well placed, I organize the products and see if anything needs to be replaced,” he explains.
After just over a year in this position, José Manuel has experienced a very positive evolution, “especially in the interaction with us,” explains Tamara Hervella, the manager of the Eiris de Arriba service station. He, for his part, is clear that what he likes most is “helping people. “I see it as a personal challenge,” she says.
Work has also changed Xiana’s life. As she herself explains, now “I get up to go to work, and I go happy and content.” She does not hesitate to proudly exclaim that she sees herself perfectly “capable of doing the same tasks as my classmates.” Sandra Pérez, manager of the CRED service station in Pontevedra, shares this same opinion: “I have noticed that she has become more confident. At first she needed a little more support, but now she already knows perfectly well everything she has to do. She is very motivated and very happy.”
The satisfaction for a job well done, and for the repercussions it has on their lives as a whole, can be read today on the faces of both young people. Xiana is happy and José Manuel does not hesitate to affirm that this has been a simply “fantastic” year for him. When he looks back and thinks about everything he has achieved in such a short time, he does not hesitate to state, with a sense of humor, that he “seems spectacular.”
