As Poland faces a shrinking workforce, employers can no longer afford to overlook the skills and potential of people with disabilities
The Polish labor market is not only losing people. It is also losing the ability to make rational use of the competencies already available. The ERGO Hestia Integralia Foundation’s latest report, One Million Untapped Talents, clearly shows the scale of this neglect: 1.06 million people with disabilities remain outside the labor market, even though they are able to work and bring specific skills to organizations.
The labor force participation rate among people with disabilities in Poland stands at 33.1%, compared with 73.4% for the overall population. This is one of the largest untapped talent reserves on the market.
This is not a social issue in the narrow sense. It is an economic and management issue. By 2035, the number of people of working age in Poland is expected to fall by 2.1 million, or 12.6%. At the same time, the employment gap for people with disabilities in Poland is among the highest in Europe, at 40 percentage points, compared with the EU average of 20 percentage points. Simply reducing this gap to the EU average would create the potential for around 170,000 additional employees.
The biggest obstacle is not a lack of candidates, but the way employers think. In the report, we describe this mechanism as the “seven deadly sins” of the labor market: prejudice, misjudging the cost of workplace adjustments, fear of lower productivity, and designing recruitment processes as if all candidates functioned in exactly the same way.
The data does not support these concerns. As many as 89.9% of professionally active people with disabilities have a moderate or mild degree of disability. Only 7–10% of people with mobility limitations use wheelchairs. In most cases, what is needed is not expensive reconstruction, but simple organizational or ergonomic changes.
That is why hiring people with disabilities should not be framed in the language of assistance. It is a matter of access to competencies, well-designed processes, and leadership quality. A company that can remove barriers expands its candidate pool, strengthens operational resilience, and makes decisions based on facts, not stereotypes.
In this sense, inclusion is not an add-on to strategy. It is a response to talent shortages, demographic pressure, and rising expectations of organizations.
