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TRANSCRIPT
“When we recruit people, even though we recruit people with disability, they don’t get pinned on our files as a person with disability because it’s a skills-based recruitment. If you can do the job, you get the job regardless of if you have a disability or not, you’re male, female or other. That is not relevant to the job. We assess people equally on their skill set and then we target that. Some of our initiatives has a cap which is 70 per cent of employment to be people identified with a disability. Broadly I would say an average of 10 per cent would in the broader organisation would be people with disability.”
That’s Yasser Zaki, the founder of Tender Loving Care or TLC, a National Disability Insurance Scheme certified service established in 2017.
The service has its head office in Sydney’s Bankstown and has grown to now employ 1,100 staff, with food, travel and accommodation leading to rapid growth.
The former sales manager with a degree in engineering migrated from Egypt in 2004.
He says when he first arrived in Australia he felt moments of loneliness, finding solace from these feelings, in public transport.
“I like to watch people’s different behaviors. So a train ride for me was the ideal thing because I would sit there on a train with no destination and just monitor people’s behaviors and changes from one area to another. When people come off a train and come on a train, I can see the different looks, the different fields, different cultures. I see that. And I used to enjoy that. It was my meditation. I did it quite often.”
Again public transport helped him connect to people in unexpected ways.
“So I’ve got this thing that I always ask people that go, even at work, I’ll go around everything. Are you okay? It is just a very common question that I ask. I was having one of those days and I’m sitting down in my own world quite upset. And then I see an elderly lady crying and as you would do, you just ask, is everything all right? Are you okay? And then she just opened up talking and telling me her story and quite a sad story. For me that was a highlight because I was in a bad mood and that made me feel like maybe things are not too bad, right?”
Yasser and the woman – who was named Margaret – developed a friendship, with Yasser regularly visiting her home to share a meal and a chat – until Margaret’s death.
He says soon after he had an epiphany of sorts, deciding to shift careers from engineering to disability support, studying social work.
“Helping someone helps us at the end of the day. And that was a shift and that was the whole career shift. It’s like if helping people feels that good, I should do more of it. And that’s when I had that moment and ended up working in disability.”
After working in disability support Yasser decided to start his own support service.
“We try and run a successful business and a sustainable business, it is to make sure that we are providing more support for more people. So the more we run a successful business, the more we can impact people’s lives and that’s the motivation behind it.”
Officially launched in July 2013, the NDIS was fully rolled out in 2020.
An Australian government review of the program released in October 2023 called for the development of a unified system of support for people with disability.
It’s something TLC says it has tried to do with initiatives offering open employment for people with disabilities across its range of businesses.
Laura Cowell is CEO of Australia-TLC.
“We have a lot of skills programs and we try and identify what people want to do with their lives. So they’ll go through a few different programs or they might volunteer in a capacity in one of our departments and then they choose whether they want come into employment or whether they want to go and do something else.”
Under the Supported Wage System a special arrangement can be made allowing employers to pay wages to a person with disability based on how productive they are in their job.
This means that these employees are often paid vastly less than minimum wage in Australia – and it’s legal.
TLC businesses employ over 1,100 people and includes a cafe, office-based work and a food import and export business.
Lauren Cowell says seventy per cent of the people employed in TLC’s food import-export business are people with disability, and they are paid at open market rates.
“We don’t think about fair wage, it should be open to everyone. You get paid for what you do and it shouldn’t be that you get paid a reduced rate because you have a disability. So we at TLC 100 per cent pay the fair award wage or above. We have people with a disability not just in our cafes. We have them in our executive team, we have them working in our departments, we have them in service delivery. And so it’s about making sure that everything that we say in those buzzwords like accessibility, fair wage, it’s all done with action and you can see that right through the organisation.”
Yasser Zaki has taken his model interstate, rolling out disability support services along the east coast of Australia with plans to expand to Canberra, Adelaide and Perth.
TLC is also planning to open a school for people with autism in Australia, and also in his home country of Egypt, following the launch of a similar venture last year in Dubai.
“We don’t stop until we get things done. I can be a little bit of a pain like that once I’m determined because I genuinely believe in what we’re trying to do. It will change lives. We know that people are struggling in home to create a platform for education and sickness. Especially that recently there has been a huge mix in the mainstream schooling for people with disability, which has merit to it. But I also feel that we put a lot of pressure on kids with autism to fit him. We didn’t do it the other way around. So that created from what we’ve seen, a little bit of stress for families and people with disability.”
TLC already operates in eight countries including Dubai the United Kingdom, United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Philippines.
“Internationally there are a lot of good things that countries do and if I can collate those and then bring it and mix them with Australian standards of delivering things, we end up delivering the best of the best because exposure gives you knowledge and experience and our participants ultimately benefit from that.”
CEO Lauren Cowell says one of the strategic aims of the business is to create a model that will outlive its founders.
“If we’re not here, we want to leave a legacy that actually continues on and on and on. And that’s why we’re looking at sustainable organisations that can run efficiently and effectively without us, but it still gives that equal open opportunity for employment to everybody.”
