Workfare: Exploitative and cruel, especially for disabled people

Some disabled people are completely fit for work, but cannot find any, so claim Jobseekers' Allowance. This is particularly an issue because disabled people face many barriers to work, including inaccessible workplaces, employer prejudice and employers being ignorant of, or refusing to adhere to the Equalities Act in relation to reasonable accommodations.

Increasingly, however, disabled people who are not fit for work are finding themselves claiming Jobseekers' Allowance, when they are reassessed and fail to meet the limited criteria for ESA. The result of this is that more and more people are signing on, but also unable to work, for health reasons.

The Guardian has published a press release from the DWP, which states,

People who have been unemployed for more than two years and haven't secured sustainable employment could be referred onto compulsory community work placements under plans being considered by the government.

Under the proposals people who have been supported intensively through the Work Programme for two years yet have still not entered sustainable employment, may have to do community work or ultimately they could lose their benefit entitlement.

Ministers believe a minority of jobseekers struggle to engage with the system fully, are unable to hold down a job and therefore require a greater level of support.

The government is to test compulsory community work coupled with more intensive support through Jobcentre Plus in four key areas ahead of rolling out the scheme
nationwide in 2013.

This is fundamentally unfair. We are in a position as a country where unemployment rates are rising, and job opportunities are shrinking. If someone has failed to get a job in 2 years, it is most likely to be due to circumstances outside their control, and to then force them into unpaid labour, against the threat of losing their pittance of an income from JSA, is exploitative.

For disabled people, even moreso. People who are disabled but genuinely fit for work will still require adaptations, accommodations, and accessibility. These people are less likely to have found a job in 2 years because of the reasons I explained above. And will the people who are happy to take unpaid labour also be happy to accommodate people with complex needs and requirements?

And those who have been found fit for work but are, in fact, not at all fit for work, will be in the most trouble. All of the above, on top of not being well enough to do it. Will their regular sickness absences or inability to be reliable cause them to lose their benefit entitlement? I would imagine so, according to what the press release says.

Workfare is exploitative and unfair to everybody who is forced to do it. For disabled people it has added layers of unfairness, which have the potential to leave, yet again, the most vulnerable abandoned without financial support.

Cross-posted at incurable hippie blog. Thanks to @m_s_collins for prompting me to write this.

[The image is a black and white photograph taken at a protest in New Zealand against a Workfare programme. There are numerous people with placards saying, "The rich get rich at the expense of the poor" and "Real jobs not workfare". It was taken by SocialistWorkerNZ and is used under a Creative Commons Licence]

Those comments by Philip Davies...

I'm sure you've all by now read Philip Davies MP's comments that disabled people should work for less than minimum wage because he claims we're less productive than non-disabled people.

What he actually said was:

"Given that some of those people with a learning disability clearly, by definition, can't be as productive in their work as somebody who hasn't got a disability of that nature, then it was inevitable that given that the employer was going to have to pay them both the same, they were going to take on the person who was going to be more productive, less of a risk, and that was doing those people a huge disservice."

From: Channel 4 News

As the EHRC quickly pointed out, this would "by definition" mean that Richard Branson is less productive than someone without dyslexia. Or Kiera Knightley, or Henry "The Fonz" Winkler, or Ben Elton, or Eddie Izzard, or Steve Jobs… Of course, dyslexia isn't the only learning difficulty out there; what about dyspraxic Daniel "Harry Potter" Radcliffe? Was he less productive than the rest of the cast in those films? I have a specific learning difficulty, I have auditory processing disorder (yes, really, in addition to my mobility impairment and my chronic health problems. I really am spectacularly unlucky). Does that mean that when I was well enough to work that I was "by definition" less productive than my peers? Did I get halfway through a stand up set and then just give up and leave the stage? No. Did I write half an article and submit that? Of course not. In my rent-paying day job did I get less photocopying done than non-disabled person would? I wish, I could've done with less monotony. And as for the risk of employing learning disabled people, it's an oft quoted fact that there is evidence to suggest that learning disabled employees take less time off work their non-disabled counterparts (like here).

This morning's discussion was about the minimum wage rather than welfare reform, but you can quite obviously see what inspired Davies's chain of thought. It's been painted in the minds of every person in the country that all disabled people are both capable of working and not working currently. You hear of visibly disabled people who don't claim any benefits being called "scrounger" in the street, and Davies was obviously making a similar assumption here; that we must all be benefit scroungers who are capable of some form of work and need to be gotten off of benefits whatever the cost, ignoring the fact that 48% of disabled people are already in work.

Of course, making disabled people work for pence will hardly be an effective tactic for getting people off benefits. Housing benefit, income support, and working tax credits are all available to people on low incomes. The less disabled people earn, the more benefits they need to receive. So if this government really wants disabled people off benefits and into jobs then making us work for a pittance is a ridiculous idea as it means our income will still be coming from the DWP rather than from our employers.

This has been the news story du jour, so there's been hundreds of blog posts and articles about it. The best two I have read are by Richard Exell and Latentexistence.

Red Tape Challenge

The government is currently running a "Red Tape Challenge" to "fight back and cut red tape."

On the about page of the "challenge" it says:

Good regulation is a good thing. It protects consumers, employees and the environment, it helps build a more fair society and can even save lives. But over the years, regulations – and the inspections and bureaucracy that go with them – have piled up and up. This has hurt business, doing real damage to our economy.

Yes. It's rules that ruined the economy, not this government's friends the bankers. Oh no. Not at all.

The ConDems - you know, the ones that want us off benefits and working - are consulting on whether or not to scrap the Equality Act 2010 as part of the "challenge"; the act that's vital to disabled people securing work.

Unsurprisingly the consultation has brought out the inner Daily Mail reader in most of the respondents so far. These people seem to think that the act is all about "positive discrimination" and don't seem to understand that the act protects men as well as women, straight people as well as gay people, and white people as well as non-white people. But I suppose that's the kind of misunderstanding people would get from reading right-wing rags.

There have been a few people standing up for equality, but sadly not nearly enough. Not that consultation really makes much of a difference, the government will still do exactly what they want just like with DLA reform, but I think us pro-equality, anti-discrimination types need to make our voices heard.

It is truly farcical that they think more disabled people will suddenly find jobs without anti-discrimination laws. Already the employment rates of disabled people are around 48%, compared with around 78% of non-disabled people (sure, some of that's to do with illness and inability to work, but discrimination in the job market is also a massive factor). The gap in the rate of employment between disabled and non-disabled people has shrunk since 2002 when it was 36% to the rate of around 29% in 2010. You can be sure that that's a direct result of the DDA getting stronger. (Stats from the ODI.)

Consulting on binning the Equality Act isn't the only thing being consulted on that may affect us. Every few weeks they're looking at a different sector and considering the regulations specific to that area. Currently they're consulting on the retail sector. From 23rd June to 6th July they're consulting on regulations around social care; when you can be sure that the rules that protect us from abusive carers and so forth (at least the ones that have been previously caught) will be threatened with those red tape snipping scissors.

Disability and employment

According to this post from the Employer's forum on Disability, the Work Capability Test will be a "disadvantage for disabled people because of a lack of employer readiness and the recession"

We all know this is true. The ConDem's keep insisting they will protect the most vulnerable but the fact is they don't see the majority of us as vulnerable.
If you can do a little then you can work. Never mind that you don't know when you can do that little bit, or that doing it might mean you have to then rest for the next few hours, or the fact the the little bit you can do may be of no use to an employer.

The article is completely right when they say that employers lack the willingness to employ us. And I don't just mean that in financial terms. They may have to pay out nothing for adjustments but the mere fact that someone has a disability often means that they will be less 'reliable, for want of a better word, than an 'abled' person. Hospital appointments, sickness, reduced hours and many, many other things have to be taken into consideration.

At a time when each job vacancy is being chased by hundreds of people, employers can take their pick. And most of them will choose a worker that doesn't have health problems.

This is the reality that we face every day. And it's a reality the ConDems refuse to acknowledge.

Cross-posted at Rage against the Coalition