This article by Bruce Birchall, in a 'personal capacity' was posted to
Danmail(Disabled People's Action Network) on 30/1/06...
From: "Bruce Birchall" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 8:03 PM
Subject: Incapacity Benefit article for Danmail
The Green Paper locates the problem in the individual,whether he or she
wants to work, is workshy, is trying hard enough, etc. But the problem lies
in social attitudes and employers' attitudes in particular.
We are still in transition from a time when the attitude used to be that
when you became disabled, you aimed to get the best deal available by way of
a medical early retirement package. This is what Trade Unions sought for
their members and it dates back to the days of the Victorian Friendly
Societies, whereby everyone chipped in so much a week as an insurance (long
before there was National Insurance) and it paid out to those who had paid
in who were no longer able
to work.
Nowadays, however, the modern response is to seek to get the employer to
retain the worker rather than retire the worker. The argument is that the
worker has skills and knowledge that are useful to the firm, that it would
take years for a new starter to obtain. So the question that is increasingly
asked is ... What adjustments to the job might be made so as to enable a
policy of retention to be effective? That could include ....
(a) assistive technology (e.g. enabling a visually-impaired person to use a
computer)
(b) working from home if the workplace is inaccessible or the travelling is
tiring or accessible transport is not available.
(c) Flexitime and other flexible working arrangements e.g. a timetable built
around the medical appointments the disabled worker now needs to attend
(d) redeployment to less strenuous work
and this all hinges on the idea that the Disability Discrimination Act 1995
introduced of "reasonable
adjustments" that can be made so as to include a disabled person, rarher
than exclude them. In this
case include them in the world of work.
So, the pattern is emerging that retention is now seen as preferable to
early retirement, but the problem is we have the "residual consciousness" of
how the problem used to be addressed still in people's heads and governing
their thinking.
One year after the onset of mid-career disability, only 60% of workers are
still in a job. Two years
after the onset of mid-career disability, only 36% of workers are still in a
job. Employers are reluctant to make the effort and to spend the money to
make reasonable adjustments. They either don't know about the government's
Access To Work Scheme, which is meant to help with the costs of making those
reasonable adjustments or they don't want to know, i.e. they persist in the
belief that "flawed" workers will take lots of time off work and will be
unreliable and less
productive.
Given that background, it is simply astonishingly naive of the Government to
believe that those
self-same employers who have erected or failed to dismantle barriers to
retention of disabled workers
are going to have this miraculous overnight Road-to-Damascus conversion to
the policy of Making
Reasonable Adjustments they would need to follow to recruit a million new
disabled workers into the
workforce.
This involves a massive failure of connection. Why did those million people
- who are stated to be capable of work - lose their jobs in the first place?
The same barriers (physical barriers, attitudinal barriers and policy
barriers) still exist and haven't gone away.
So even if there a million jobs out there waiting to be filled (I would need
convincing of that), why would employers choose to fill them with disabled
people, if their heads are still full of "medical
retirement"/"flawed worker" thinking.
Yet IB Claimants are to lose benefits if they won't attend job-interviews!
When the problem lies in the unwillingness of employers to provide work for
disabled people!
One workplace that won't be offering many new jobs to disabled people, or to
non-disabled people in this country either is the Department of Work &
Pensions. A memo leaked to the Guardian a week ago reveals that there are
secret plans to offshore much of their work to call centres in Third World
Countries, where workers would be paid less than a fifth of what the people
currently doing those jobs are now being paid. PCS, the union involved,
weren't even consulted!
And John Hutton would have us believe that Welfare Reform isn't about saving
money but about helping people!
Pull the other one!
If his Department's way of helping people back into work is to sack large
numbers of workers
and hand their jobs to Third World Countries at a fifth of the cost, what
sort of example does this
create for other employers to follow!?
One might call this Pathways to the Dole Queue and the Green Paper
Impoverishing the Life-Chances of Disabled People!
Bruce Birchall
(member of the TUC Disability Committee)
(in a personal Incapacity)
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