A plan to halve the employment gap between disabled and non-disabled people is at the heart of the government’s green paper Improving Lives: Work, Health and Disability.
Consultation ends on Friday, and the work and pensions secretary, Damian Green, is keen to know our thoughts. Personally, I’m torn between wanting to congratulate Green on the scale of his ambitious, 10-year goal and wanting to be convinced that he actually understands the problem he is trying to solve. I hope he gets it right. Speaking as someone profoundly disabled with 35 years in the workplace, I believe there are a few important home truths that he still needs to take on board.
Despite some positive changes, such as the Disability Discrimination Act (1995), equality in the workplace remains a distant dream for a majority of disabled people. For example, latest research from the Royal National Institute of Blind People, shows that only 26% of blind and visually impaired people of working age are employed. And it isn’t because of a lack of skills and qualifications. According to the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services, blind graduates are twice as likely as their non-disabled counterparts to be unemployed.
The green paper says disability unemployment “is one of the most significant inequalities in the UK today and the government cannot stand aside when it sees social injustice and unfairness”. Sounds good – but there’s a slight problem. It fails to make any connection between stubbornly high rates of disability unemployment and the significant shift in work culture that we’ve all witnessed over the past 30 years.
Back in the 1980s when I applied for my first teaching post, the situation seemed relatively straightforward. I had two relevant degrees, a qualification in teaching, and the belief that I was embarking on a career I could both cope with and, in time, be good at. Of course, I knew that being blind involved some additional challenges. There were the more mundane parts of the work – like marking, keeping student records and registers – that I would always be much slower at. But that was something I was prepared to shoulder. If anyone at my job interview had raised this as a problem, I would have pointed out the many qualities that made me an excellent candidate. I was an expert in my subject; I was able to convey a love of language and literature to young people; I was conscientious and hard-working.
And so, for several years, I was that most fortunate of beings: someone with a profound disability doing a job I both enjoyed and was good at.
But then the tide turned and things began to change. More students per class; more teaching hours per week; and more teaching weeks per year. Nobody liked the changes, but they were having a disproportionately negative impact on me as a disabled employee. Every change emphasised those mundane, quantitative parts of the job at which I was necessarily much slower. Endless new paperwork and extra marking, which already took me twice as long as non-disabled colleagues, began to consume my weekends.
Eventually, it was this increasing workload that persuaded me to change direction and become a support coordinator for disabled students. Once again, I was very clear that I had the qualities necessary to do a good job, and for a time that was what happened. It took me a while to realise that all I’d actually done was move my stall a little higher up the beach, and that the tide of change was still heading my way.
By then, we were well into the era of “bums on seats”. Every new student arrived fully costed, and it wasn’t long before some ingenious bean-counter devised a formula for standardising and pricing the support required by disabled students. The times I had a positive impact on students’ lives and the qualities that made me good at my job never counted in the numerical data that increasingly dictated our work.
Once I had to log what I was doing every hour of the day, it became possible to say I was less efficient than non-disabled colleagues. Once we had departmental targets, I felt acutely aware that colleagues might think I wasn’t pulling my weight. And once redundancy-driven reorganisations became an annual event, my cooperative and supportive workplace became racked by rumour and rivalry.
Personally, it’s a change of culture I don’t much like. It no longer matters whether a job is well done: just as long as it can be shown that the maximum number of units were processed in the minimum possible time. It devalues what’s good about me, and, it penalises those of us in the workplace for whom speed never was and never will be our strongest suit.
Of course, education isn’t the only area to have suffered in this way. The same spirit-crushing regime of quantification, monitoring and targets has affected many other areas of work. And nowhere’s been harder hit than the public sector where, in an earlier, more supportive and cooperative era, many blind and disabled people found decent, sustainable employment.
Incredibly, the green paper’s authors expect the public sector to take the lead in hiring tens of thousands of people with disabilities. Don’t they know, our public sector is no longer a haven of equality? And have they honestly forgotten who made our schools, hospitals and local authorities bow to business models and practices so ill-suited to their founding principles?
Damian Green needs to keep in mind that we’ve moved from a qualitative to a quantitative work culture. And, if he’s serious about helping a million disabled people into sustainable jobs, then this is the context in which his aspirations will either sink or swim.
