Rich Israel

Inefficient, incompetent management, taking advantage of people with disabilities. The management at the local and corporate level take advantage and prey on people living with disabilities. The management are professional schmoozers who will talk well in front of the many potential contract service providers and community members paraded through the facility, but you should see what goes on behind the scenes. PWI sets themselves up as a nobel for helping people with disabilities find work; don't be fooled. They have a handful of clients whom they successfully placed in long-term employment, and use this handful of successful placements to tout the company as a benevolent one. The truth is, they run sheltered workshops, where they are supposedly "training people and teaching them job skills" when in reality the clients are working their hardest to earn a wage doing jobs which they are not capable of doing. None of the clients get an assessment to place them in a job where they can perform at their best capacity. Consequently clients with no fine motor skills and living with disabilities like Cerebral Palsy are required to complete contracts where they must use their hands to complete tasks like placing 1" labels on 1.25" in pipes. A client can spend 10 minutes to place a single label on correctly -- working their hardest to concentrate and quell their spastic hands to do it while being belittled by staff members for not working hard enough. At the end of the day, staff calcualtes the number of items completed, not the length of time it took a client to complete them. Consequently clients walk away with $1 - 4 /day for four hours of work. The company then pockets the money from contract services that they dont have to pay the clients because the clients "workedtoo slow." It is morally wrong. This is basically a day program, not an employment program. Clients do NOT move from the sheltered workshop to a group site to individual placement as implied. Clients assigned to the contract services stay there for YEARS because no assessments are made and no effort put forth to properly assign tasks based on abilities. The productivity of the entire company is severely compromised because of lack of communication between departments, leaving employees to search for work or sit around until management can come and approve or complete tasks. Then, corporate management comes onsite, announcing that productivity must be increased. The local management doesn't own up to being the cause of the problem, instead allowing the job coaches to take the fall. Adult protective services should be called on PWI for the deplorable working conditions at some of the group sites where dependent, disabled people work without protective gear, unsanitary bathrooms/working conditions and seriously dangerous working environments. OSHA would close some of those sites down in an instant if they were aware of the conditions. Combine unsafe working conditions with disabled people and you have a recipe for disaster. It is only a matter of time before someone gets seriously injured. Getting paid $10/hour to supervise and train up to 20 cognitively disabled adults on work projects? If I were to supervise 20 people at another company, the pay would be commiserate. Constant wage freezes don't allow for raises, claiming that because they are a nonprofit, they cannot afford it. They need a new CFO if they cannot figure out how to appropriately allot funds to properly pay staff. Cut out the fundraising parties to woo the community, cut the budget for the food used at all the weekly tours, put the funds towards hiring competent management who can mentor staff and staff who can mentor clients, not berate them. PWI says they are a nonprofit who doesn't have money for proper safety equipment. How can you not have money for safety equipment like gloves and protective eyeware? The clients don't know how to advocate for themselves, but the management pays no attention to the recommendations of staff. It is a desperate situation.