Bill Gleeson: Disabled people don’t choose to be unemployed

Aug 1 2007 by Bill Gleeson, Liverpool Daily Post

POLITICAL parties of both colours have for many years been looking at ways of reducing the number of long-term sick and disability benefit claimants by encouraging recipients to return to work.

It is easy to understand why the Government has been so keen to cut the numbers – and it is not because the politicians believe that disabled people would be better off at work.

There are three times the number of people on such benefits as there are people claiming jobseekers’ allowance and long-term support represents a big cost to the public purse.

As Prime Minister, Tony Blair was keen to introduce measures designed to tackle the trickiest groups, but the fact is there has been more talk than action in this area of policy.

It isn’t clear that it’s the right thing to do. Sick and disabled people don’t choose to be unemployed or live in relative poverty.

There are some groups whose conditions or impairments mean it would be inappropriate to put any type of pressure on them to return to work. Many others who could return to work find obstacles other than their disability preventing them from doing so. Many disabled people remain on benefits because employers won’t recruit them. They apply for jobs and get invited to interview, but once they show up in a wheelchair or with a white stick in hand, an excuse is found not to recruit them.

Nobody sees the fault in themselves. If you surveyed 1,000 people, they would all insist they wouldn’t be discriminatory. The same people would genuinely be upset and horrified by any accusation that they are discriminatory. Yet there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of disabled people excluded from the workplace, so clearly somebody is doing something wrong.

When push comes to shove, employers are risk-averse. They fear extra costs or the individual recruiter fears they will be blamed if something goes wrong with the appointment. The prejudice is ingrained into the way businesses conduct themselves.

On top of that, too many people think the anti-discrimination legislation is there to protect disabled people already in a job, whereas in fact it is meant to also assist disabled people to find new jobs or promotion within their existing firms.

In the end, there are only so many times a disabled person is willing to hit his or her head against this brick wall, and so they will often give up trying and become reliant on benefits. That is why there needs to be more robust legislation that hurts discriminatory employers harder than at present. The Government needs to take the opportunity of its current review of equality legislation to beef-up the law.

THE Tata name is one of the best known in Indian commerce.

Its roots can be traced back to the 19th century and the modern-day business has interests in a wide variety of activities, including steel, cars, consultancy, food processing and many others.

Tata Group has a clear and uncomplicated ethos to do good business while taking account of the interests of other stakeholders. Over the years, it has gone from strength to strength.

Now we hear that one part of the Tata empire has its eye on acquiring one of Merseyside’s industrial gems, namely Ford’s Halewood factory that produces the Jaguar X-type and Land Rover Freelander.

While staff anxiety about the future under any new management is understandable, it is quite possible that life as part of the Tata dynasty would, should they buy the car businesses, be a lot rosier than it has been for the past decade under American ownership.