by Frances Ryan
As the image of the ‘work-shy’ disabled festers, in reality, unemployed disabled people relentlessly send out CVs and receive rejections: Scope research in 2017 found that disabled people have to apply for 60 per cent more jobs than non-disabled people before being hired.42 This is little surprise: in 2019, Leonard Cheshire found that nearly a quarter of employers in Britain admit they’d be less likely to hire a disabled person,43 despite the law clearly stating that people with disabilities should not be discriminated against when seeking employment.
Forty-one years old, Christopher – who has autism and a learning disability, as well as a speech impediment – has been struggling to find work for the past twenty years. ‘It drives you round the wall. Year after year,’ he says, wearily. ‘You’re forced to worry about the future every day.’
Christopher speaks to me from his parents’ house in Cornwall. At his age, he wants to move out to a place of his own (‘I feel like a failure,’ he tells me) but he knows he’s stuck until he’s got a secure wage coming in. Since he left school in the 1990s, he’s struggled to keep hold of jobs. He finds it hard to ‘fit in’ with colleagues when they don’t understand autism, while employers judge him as less capable once they hear his stutter. Contract work is sporadic: a spell as a postman lasted eight months and a bed raiser fitter only a month. For the last year, he’s worked as a cleaner at a plastic factory two miles down the road: a contract for twelve hours a week at minimum wage. He earns £181 every fortnight – or just about enough to keep his car running to look for other work.
The bureaucracy of the tax and benefit system means he’s shut off from state support: if he hits sixteen hours a week, his employer has to start paying national insurance and he becomes eligible for working tax credits: £400 every four weeks. As it stands, he has to sign on at the JobCentre to prove he’s looking for work. In May 2017, they sent him for a four-week training course on the Work Programme – the government’s flagship ‘welfare-to-work’ scheme – but it did nothing to help him secure a job. The programme was promoted as being designed specifically for disabled people but in practice Chris was put alongside people with vastly different conditions: from mental health problems to chronic illness. ‘You just get lumbered in,’ he says. ‘I asked, what sort of help do have you for autism? They said, “Not much.” ’
This is set to get worse. The Work Programme and Work Choice – the programme specifically for disabled jobseekers – was abolished in autumn 2017 and replaced by the succinctly named Work and Health Programme. Like the Work Programme before it – famed for its 93 per cent failure rate for finding long-term jobs for claimants with disabilities44 – the Work and Health Programme has been contracted out to private companies and has a reduced budget: cut from £750 million in 2013–14 to less than £130 million by 2017.45 That translates as 45,000 fewer disabled people being allowed onto specialist employment provision each year between 2017 and 2020.46 Meanwhile, there’s no commitment by the government that, post-Brexit, the European Social Fund support – currently worth over £500 million a year in specialist support for disabled jobseekers47 – will be replaced beyond 2020.
At the same time, annual cuts of £140 million a year over the next decade will see government JobCentres – the bricks and mortar of local unemployment support – across the country merge or shut their doors entirely,48 forcing the long-term sick and disabled to trek further for basic support or even access the Internet or a computer. Tellingly, these JobCentre cuts were launched just at the time ministers began to roll out a benefits system that more than ever required claimants to access the Internet; to receive Universal Credit, would-be claimants must apply online as well as use the website to apply for jobs, prepare CVs and register for required training courses – or risk a benefit sanction. However, 22 per cent of disabled adults in the UK had never used the Internet in 2017,49 with the poorest households particularly unlikely to have access. It means that the people who most need Universal Credit are the most likely to be punished for not having the means to apply for it.
Put this against existing changes to on-the-job support for disabled workers and it’s a vision of a widespread removal of employment support for disabled people in Britain. Access to Work – the government-funded scheme that from 1994 provided grants for practical support, from computer software to British sign language interpreters, for disabled people at work – has seen cuts by stealth since 2014, with Deaf workers in particular reporting reductions in the amount of support available, payment delays and fewer hours of help. While politicians fetishize pushing disabled people into the labour market, the support needed to make this possible is shredded.
Ask a government minister about disability employment rates and the claim is typically that almost 600,000 disabled people moved into work in the UK between 2013 and 2017.50 But dig a bit further and much of this is marked by ‘fluctuating employment’: disabled people who may have a job now but soon enough risk losing it (disabled people are more than twice as likely to fall out of work than non-disabled people51). As of 2017, disabled people are dropping out of work faster than they’re moving into it: Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show that for every 100 disabled people moving into work, 114 leave.52
The figure of ‘600,000’ also fails to say anything about the quality of jobs on offer – whether these are full-time contracted jobs that are equipping workers with a living wage and sick leave or, say, piecemeal labour forcing disabled people to live hand to mouth. For example, Christopher has not had a full-time job since 2009. Instead, he’s been bouncing between part-time work for the past decade: A porter at a care agency. Car valet. Market worker. Selling clothes in Tesco’s. A music apprentice. Since we first met in 2016, Christopher’s emails me regularly as he searches for more part-time work to add to his hours at the factory. He applies for jobs relentlessly – anything going that he has a slight chance at – but gets knocked back each time. In September 2017, he emailed to tell me his first bit of luck: he’s been offered work at a bakery. Fourteen hours a week sorting the pots in the dishwasher and taking the bread out of the ovens. The work would push him over his sixteen-hour target for in-work benefits but it was in South Brent, Devon. To get there, the daily journey included a half-hour car drive and then a ferry ride. What’s more, the shifts would have to be slotted into his hours at the factory. Some days, Christopher would have to do three to five hours at the bakery in Devon, travel back to Cornwall, get to the factory and clean for three hours. Over the weekend, it would mean finishing at 10 p.m. one day and starting the next at 5 a.m. Christopher was already working out a plan how to wake up every morning: ‘I’ll get two alarms and set them fifteen minutes apart.’
Across the economy we have seen the rise of the casualization of work in Britain, with the proliferation of workers on zero-hours contracts, doing agency work or earning the minimum wage on scattered hours. A study by the University of Manchester in 2017 found that poor-quality jobs are actually worse for your health than unemployment, with a shift to jobs that are high-stress and low-pay routinely damaging to workers’ bodies and minds.53 But what makes an insecure job difficult for workers generally can make it debilitating for someone with a disability or health condition. Agency workers, for example, are not entitled to sick pay.
Christopher says the stress is a constant now and this way of living is having an impact on his health. The factory is a ‘sauna’ and the noise from the machines is piercing despite the use of ear protectors that block the vibrations as he works. He recently pulled a muscle in his shoulder and, suffering constant pain, he went to A & E to get a script for higher pain meds but he couldn’t afford the £8.50 prescription charge. Instead, he got some Ibuprofen from Morrison’s to get through his shifts: £1.50 a box. ‘You’re making these decisions all the time,’ he says. ‘It’s horrible.’ I continue to talk to Chris over the next year as he struggles to keep hold of his cleaning job while constantly looking for more work. One evening in autumn 2018, he had an accid
ent at the factory, this time burning himself with the cleaning bleach, followed by another trip to A & E. ‘It makes you feel even more awful having to be on the minimum wage because you feel you’re bottom of the heap,’ he says. ‘Actually, it makes you mad inside.’
Around a third of disabled people – 30 per cent of disabled men and 35 per cent of women – are paid below the national living wage in Britain,54 holding down jobs while chronically ill or disabled and being rewarded for it with poverty wages. It is still routine for disabled workers to be paid less than non-disabled colleagues. The EHRC August 2017 report on pay gaps found that the disability pay gap – the difference between what non-disabled and disabled workers earn – was at 13.6 per cent.55 That inequality gets even worse if you’re a disabled person who also happens to be a woman or from an ethnic minority background. Disabled men from the Bangladeshi community, for example, experience a pay gap of a staggering 56 per cent compared with non-disabled white men.56
Instead of challenging the disability pay gap, politicians often actively advocate it. The idea that it should be legal for employers to pay disabled people less than the minimum wage, for example, has been a recurring mainstream claim in recent years, particularly about people with learning disabilities. In 2014, a key Conservative ‘welfare’ minister, Lord Freud, was recorded as stating that some disabled people are ‘not worth the full wage’.57 They could, he suggested, be paid as little as two pounds an hour. In 2018, Chancellor Philip Hammond linked the low productivity of the economy with the increased number of disabled people in the workforce, much to the outrage of disability organizations.58 This is nothing less than the promotion of a second-class wage system, justified by the false premise that disabled people are less productive than ‘normal people’ and employers need a financial incentive to take ‘the risk’ of hiring them.
The language is more disguised but this ‘two-tier’ wage system is also advocated by left-wing voices. The chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee, Labour MP Frank Field, published an essay in September 2017 recommending paying disabled people less than the minimum wage as a way of reducing disability unemployment.59 You might almost respect the gall: not only are disabled people told to accept segregated wages but are told it is actually for our benefit. ‘The people who are most disadvantaged by the national minimum wage are the most vulnerable in society,’ as Conservative MP Philip Davies put it in 2011 as he called for employers to be allowed to pay workers with mental health problems less than other employees. ‘My concern about it is it prevents those people from being given the opportunity to get the first rung on the employment ladder.’60
In reality, such measures are likely to only further segregate disabled people in the workplace, giving a free pass to exploitative employers while, at the same time, putting downward pressure on the wages of other workers. Speaking on a panel at the Conservative Party conference in 2018, former ‘welfare’ chief Iain Duncan Smith suggested that bosses should hire disabled workers because ‘they often work longer hours’ and ‘forgo quite a lot of holiday because they love the whole idea of being in work’.61 When it comes to the disability pay gap, there’s an urgent need to address the causes. The EHRC found in 2017 that offering flexible hours to all job applicants will increase job opportunities for disabled people, as well as help tackle the gender pay gap.62 As it stands, advertised flexible working hours are a rarity; while all employees currently have the right to request flexible working after twenty-six weeks of work, some employers don’t offer flexible working – such as job shares or home working – for senior roles or at all.
Meanwhile, the building blocks that help people earn a decent wage are still disproportionately cut off from disabled people. Almost twice as many non-disabled people have a degree than disabled people (19 per cent versus 35 per cent),63 while almost one in five disabled people have no qualification whatsoever64 – a rate nearly three times higher than for people without disabilities. This contributes to young disabled people quickly being put on the scrapheap. Research from Leonard Cheshire in 2017 found that by the age of twenty-six, disabled people are nearly four times more likely to be unemployed than their non-disabled peers.65 The same Leonard Cheshire study found that half of eighteen- to thirty-year-old adults said their teachers may have had ‘lower expectations’ of them because of their disability, while almost half also said that they weren’t encouraged to go on a course or pursue their chosen career.
In Cornwall, Chris left school without any qualifications (‘I think the best I got was a G in English’), and it’s directly reduced his chance of getting work. He went back to college in his twenties to get his GCSEs: a D in English and C in Maths. ‘It’s a good job mum’s alive or I’d be out on the street,’ he says. ‘But then it’s been like that for twenty-five years.’
While disability unemployment is individualized – painted as a lack of effort from the ‘work-shy’ disabled – in reality, it’s these structural barriers that keep disabled people out of the workplace. The inequality that disabled people face at work does not exist in a vacuum; it connects to the fact that in the twenty-first century, Britain is still built in a way that largely shuts us out.
The disability charity Papworth Trust reports that one of the most common barriers to work for disabled people is as mundane as a difficulty with transport;66 the fact that, say, wheelchair users can’t get on most of the London Underground, or a bus doesn’t have a hearing loop. A government audit of 30,000 restaurants and shops in 2014 found what it called ‘shocking’ access to the high street, including a fifth of shops having no wheelchair access and only 15 per cent of restaurants and shops installing hearing loops; there’s little chance of getting a job as a waiter or shop assistant if the premises aren’t even accessible.67
At the same time, cash-strapped local authorities are cutting services that disabled people rely on to get them to work, from public transport to social care. In 2018, the Campaign for Better Transport found council funding for bus services had almost halved since 2010.68
The past twenty years have seen the introduction of landmark legislation to enshrine disabled people’s basic employment rights in Britain – 1995’s Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), followed by the 2010 Equality Act, made it illegal for the first time for employers to discriminate against a disabled person. Before then, in the so-called modern age of the mid-1990s, a prospective employer could refuse to hire someone because he was Deaf or sack a wheelchair user because they couldn’t climb the stairs to the office, and the victim would have no protection under the law.
But while the law has offered some progress, disabled people in the workplace are still facing a decidedly hostile environment, be it being verbally abused, overlooked for promotion, or illegally pushed out of the job altogether. Research by GMB, the union representing neurodivergent workers, in 2017 found that 70 per cent of workers with conditions such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia and dyspraxia report experiencing discrimination.69 One in two disabled people have experienced bullying or harassment at work because of their disabilities, according to research by the charity Scope in 2017.70 The same study found that this discrimination has reached such heights that over half of workers with a disability feel at risk of losing their job. The fragmenting of employment rights that’s come with the boom in zero-hour contracts and agency work only exacerbates this insecurity, where disabled agency workers have no protection from unfair dismissal or redundancy.
Pearl has been sacked twice in nine months because she’s disabled. The twenty-eight-year-old has dystonia – her hands, neck, shoulder, and right foot repeatedly spasm – and has worked in the media with high-profile companies since university. She needs adaptations at work such as dictation equipment as she can’t type for long periods. She cannot walk for long stretches either. But for the last few years, as she’s built her career, she’s found that employers assume she’s ‘faking’ her disability or is a ‘nuisance’ for mentioning it.
‘People think I’m exaggerating, “oh, she’s putting it on,” ’ she says. ‘I’ve heard so many times from bosses, “just leave your [disability] at the office door.” ’
I first speak to Pearl in December 2016 from her parents’ home in Cardiff as she’s just been fired from a media group in London after enduring months of verbal abuse. At one point, she had a panic attack in the office and her dystonia – exacerbated by anxiety – made it difficult for her to type or concentrate. Instead of support, she was given a critical work review on the spot and told how ‘slow’ she could be. Her doctor prescribed Valium for the stress and she eventually had a breakdown. As the anxiety exacerbates her disability, her muscles deteriorated to the extent she had to move back in with her parents.
Barely nine months later, it happened again. Pearl had moved back to London in September 2017 for a new job – a three-month contract as a marketing assistant for a charity – but within a week of starting work, despite knowing about her disability, her bosses gave her tasks including lugging heavy equipment, walking two miles and standing all day. It escalated on an ‘away day’ in Margate when her boss made her do a ‘walk-and-talk’ meeting around the town: step after step for four hours with Pearl ‘trailing behind’ as the hours went on. To get home, Pearl then had to walk four or five miles back to the train station because her boss claimed she couldn’t find a taxi for her. The strain of that sort of physical excursion leads Pearl’s muscles to tense (‘It’s hard to describe just how painful that is’) and she had to spend the weekend in bed to recover. In the end, the trip was so damaging to her disability that it affected her posture for two months. By that point, only six weeks after starting the job, Pearl had already been fired – for what her employers termed ‘creating a negative atmosphere in the office’. ‘Essentially, for getting publicly upset having been bullied because of my disability,’ she translates.