Red Pepper » Disability

The benefit freeze: taking from the poorest to give to the richest?

louise — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 09:57:30 +0000

Photo: Disabled People Against Cuts

The public were told that disabled people will be protected from the 1 per cent annual increase freeze on benefits. This is not the case at all. In the coalition’s own Equality Impact Assessment (July 2012) it states:

‘Of the households who lose from this policy, based on internal modeling, we expect roughly half will contain somebody who is classed as disabled under the Equality Act’. As the standard of equality impact assessments from this government go, this is an alarming revelation compared to the usual lacklustre attempt which routinely announces little impact for those policies so obviously set to cause additional devastation to disabled people’s lives and independence.

Before the coalition came to power, disabled people already faced some of the greatest levels of poverty in the UK. That had always been the case because of all the barriers to employment that we face. Cameron said he would protect those who are most ‘vulnerable’ and Miller, ex minister ‘for’ disabled people, said the coalition would support those with the highest needs. Esther McVey, the current minister against the disabled, has repeated the same hollow mantra.

Yet, we have seen attack after attack. Before Christmas the coalition announced that the Independent Living Fund (ILF) would close completely by 2015. This fund has for many years, supported people with the highest level of needs: who either need round-the-clock availability of assistance, sometimes including elements of nursing care, or help with the majority of physical actions. It had already been closed to new applicants in 2010. For many the complete closure of the ILF will mean support is withdrawn as they will become dependent on local authorities, which, after billions of pounds worth of coalition cuts are unable to sustain adequate support. Some local authorities, such as Worcester and Wiltshire, say they may institutionalise disabled people as a cheaper option. All say that people will not get the same level of support from their local authority as they did under ILF.

The coalition assertion that disabled people will be protected is also shown to be an outright lie in other ways. The Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) that is claimed to be protected is not; only the support component of this is. The support component exists only for the smallest minority, representing around thirty pounds per week – the rest of ESA is subject to the freeze – thus the majority of disabled people on it will be affected, rather than protected.

The impact assessment does not manage to identify that disabled people are not a homogenous group, but fall into other groups affected too – nor indeed does the government rhetoric, preferring to portray us all as merely passive benefit recipients. Disabled people in work will be affected as tax credits are frozen. In addition, single disabled women will be more affected, as will single women who are also parents or parents of disabled children; there will be additional issues if they are from a black or minority ethnic group (since they already suffer from relatively poor levels of service in comparison to the rest of us).

Then there is the projected 500,000 people knocked off Disability Living Allowance in the changeover to Personal Independence Payment. Did you know that AFTER the consultation exercise on this, the government quietly changed the qualifying criterion in relation to distance you are able to move (in a manual wheelchair or otherwise) to a mere 20 metres, from 50 metres? And that had already been halved from the criterion under DLA, which was 100 metres!

Already the much maligned Work Capability Assessments carried out by Atos have caused homelessness, suicides, and early deaths. In 2011, within just 6 weeks of the WCA, 10,600 sick and disabled people died. We await in trepidation, the 2012 figures. If the one percent freeze disproportionately affects the poorest (because they have to spend all their money and basics like food are rising steeply) then for disabled people it represents an even harsher blow, another cruel cut in real terms for subsistence existences. Expect the return of disabled people forced to beg on the streets.

The cumulative impact is huge; added to other draconian cuts it’s the most devastating attack on disabled people by any government in post war Britain – the same government that gives those earning more than £150,000 a year a 5 per cent tax cut.

And all because these cuts are necessary? No. Regular readers will know that the deficit never was as bad as we’ve been told and could easily be remedied by tackling tax avoidance, building homes and creating jobs. To support our cause, please spread this information far and wide.

For more information please go to: www.dpac.uk.net or follow on Twitter: @Dis_PPL_Protest

Able to fight: How disabled people are taking on the Tories

admin — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:52:03 +0000

Disabled people stopped London traffic by chaining their wheelchairs together earlier this year. Photo: Pete Riches
‘We feel that these are violations of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We haven’t striven for 70 years to have all these rights taken away from us in one parliament.’ John McArdle, co-founder of the Scotland-based Black Triangle Campaign, doesn’t mince his words when he talks about the need to fight the government’s cuts agenda.
All the activists interviewed for this piece shared the same anger and passion. As far as anti-austerity activism goes, the disability movement has remained mobilised, vocal and determined when other sectors of the population appear tet to have fully awakened, or in the case of students, have lost momentum after initial dramatic revolts. As John McDonnell MP warned the House of Commons in June, ‘We now have a disability movement in this country of which we have not seen the equal before … These people are not going to go away.’
That movement has been building for some time. ‘Miss Dennis Queen’ is a blogger and longtime disability rights activist with the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN), who’s been involved in campaigning for more than 12 years. She acknowledges the recent ‘explosion’ of campaigning but emphasises the coalition’s policies aren’t entirely new – and neither is resistance. Labour had devised cuts that were taken on and set in stone by the current government: ‘We were talking about this before but protests at that time weren’t being reported.’
Likewise the most high profile campaigns, such as DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts), already existed within the disability rights movement, which had been working for years to further equality, inclusion and recognition for the disabled population. The cuts put years of hard-won progress into reverse gear with such velocity that suffering was filtering from boardrooms to bedrooms with brutal speed. By the time the protest movement surged with students and other anti-cuts groups, thousands of disabled people were ready for a call to arms.
Bold action
The blockade of Oxford Circus with wheelchairs tied together with chain on 28 January demonstrated the readiness for civil disobedience – along with the ability to grab headlines. Andy Greene, a member of DPAC’s national steering committee, explains that the action came about as the welfare reform bill was going through parliament and was high on the agenda of both DPAC and their partners-in-protest UK Uncut. He says: ‘It kick-started consciousness more than anything … It showed we had the power within the movement to reignite the militant actions that hadn’t been seen since the late eighties and early nineties.’
Miss Dennis Queen thinks there’s an inherent power in taking direct action as a disabled person. For observers, she says, ‘being aware of us doing it contradicts the prejudice around us. It’s so opposite to what is expected of us that it educates everyone.’ And the sight of wheelchairs outnumbered by police, she adds, further proves their points.
Bold and creative actions and demonstrations have become a hallmark of the campaigns. Further London roadblocks – in Trafalgar Square, outside the Houses of Parliament – and occupations such as that of the Glasgow Atos office all involve the physical taking of space. They assert disabled people’s existence in a policy climate that seems bent on erasure, while the blocking of traffic symbolises the blocking of bills. In occupying the head office of Deloitte in Scotland, Black Triangle was showing the movement’s alternative narrative, a critique of neoliberalism, finance and tax-dodging in particular, to that put forth by the government. The accountancy firm was targeted because of the Deloitte chairman – and ‘tax-dodging guru’ – David Cruickshank’s cosy relationship with David Hartnett at HM Revenue and Customs.
John McArdle is critical of recent media resistance to reporting on demonstrations such as these. He cites the Trafalgar Square action in April: ‘The BBC reported there were traffic problems in their bulletins but there was a blackout basically. Definitely there seems to be a conscious decision not to report on acts of civil disobedience.’
The failure to cover events is not a surprise, though. While Westminster is, in McArdle’s words, ‘coming up with sheer lies and propaganda’ to garner public support for the cuts, the media seem only too happy to act as their cheerleaders. A frequently-cited example is the claim that there are huge levels of fraud in disability living allowance claims. The actual figure, according to the Department of Work and Pensions’ own report, Fraud and Error in the Benefit System, published in February, is 0.5 per cent.
Hate campaign
The government-led misinformation around these figures has underpinned what amounts to a hate campaign from the tabloid press towards disability benefit claimants. This was epitomised by the Sun’s vitriolic editorial against ‘scroungers’ in which it claimed: ‘They cannot be bothered to find a job or they claim to be sick when they are perfectly capable of work because they prefer to sit at home watching widescreen TVs – paid for by YOU.’
At the same time, police figures show the rate of disability hate crime has soared. A total of 1,942 disability hate crimes were recorded by police forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2011, up by 14 per cent on 2010 and doubling since the start of the financial crisis in 2008. According to Andy Greene, ‘Everyday on the DPAC website we’re hearing of people being accosted in the street, in their own homes, on public transport.’
In response, disability rights groups and activists have been flooding the internet with their own stories. Blogs – sarcastically named with the labels they aim to repudiate, such as ‘Benefit Scrounging Scum’ and ‘Diary of a Benefit Scrounger’ – have gained huge support, featuring honest accounts of negotiating the benefits system and daily life with a disability or ill health. The Black Triangle campaign website was the eighth top political blog in the ebuzzing rankings in June, while Diary of a Benefit Scrounger was ranked 15th in July.
Miss Dennis Queen comments: ‘People talk about “armchair activists”, the label used to mean people sitting in their house with opinions not necessarily taking action. But in 12–13 years of being an activist I have done most of my work from my bed.’ From resource sharing to petitions, mythbusting and networking, the internet is not just a tool but a realm for protest within the movement, and an ultimately inclusive one: those who can’t get on the streets can act from home.
This is just one example of the movement’s stated aim to use every mean at its disposal to fight back. Equally important are the links made between different campaigns, trade unions and the medical profession. Disability campaigns have reached out to trade unions to work on common goals such as protecting public services and the rights of disabled people in the workplace. One example is the Hardest Hit coalition, particularly active in the north east, where trade unions, campaigners and charities have come together to organise conferences, rallies, protests and written reports about the effects of government policy.
Support from within the medical establishment, particularly with regard to work capability assessments, is also gaining momentum. In May, GPs at the BMA’s local medical committees conference in Liverpool called for the test to be scrapped as it was harming patients. Others have been publicly questioning whether the tests are in violation of medical ethics. At the BMA’s annual conference in June, the doctors’ union passed a motion demanding that work capability assessments be ended ‘with immediate effect and be replaced with a rigorous and safe system that does not cause unavoidable harm to some of the weakest and vulnerable in society’.
Even as the coalition tries to keep bulldozing its policies through, and local authorities keep burying their heads in the sand about the impact of their cuts, the disability movement is showing they won’t get away without a fight.

Atos and the Paralympics: rubbing salt in the wounds

Atos Healthcare’s contract to assess the ‘fitness for work’ of incapacity benefit, ESA and DLA claimants is worth £100 million per year. The company’s boss Thierry Breton was awarded a £1 million bonus this year on top of his annual pay packet of nearly £1 million. The multi-million pound IT company is one of the big winners from the government’s welfare reform programme and its privatisation agenda.
The assessments carried out by the company have become a lynchpin of the coalition’s welfare reforms. They have been criticised by doctors as ‘dominating the whole procedure’ for assigning benefit categories – despite lacking medical expertise and working, it is claimed, to targets rather than seeking an accurate reflection of need. Staff have reportedly used Facebook to refer to claimants as ‘parasitic wankers’ and ‘down and outs’.
Most controversy surrounding the assessments has been around the criteria used and the impact the stress of them has on people’s health. It’s not difficult to see why they have been widely lambasted as fundamentally flawed: Citizens Advice Scotland found that among the claimants deemed fit for work were people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, bipolar disorder, heart failure, strokes, severe depression and terminal cancer. The tests, based on drop-down box choices on a computer program, are said to be inadequate for complex conditions.
The government has boasted that half of all new ESA claimants are found fit for work. However, between 40-70 per cent of the decisions are being appealed, and so far 40 per cent of appeals have won – costing millions in taxpayer money on top of the distress and financial hardship of wrong assessments. The Daily Mirror recently reported that 32 people a week died last year after being deemed to be well enough to go out and get a job.
The human impact is becoming clearer. Coroners’ reports on suicides have noted the stress of the assessment and appeals process as a contributory factor, while citizens’ advice and welfare advice services are inundated with people seeking help on appealing benefit decisions. Not surprisingly, Atos has become one of the top targets for protesters. People are also using the web to share Atos horror stories, which continue to emerge thick and fast.
Atos’s sponsorship of the Paralympics this year has enraged campaigners as ‘rubbing salt into the wounds’. Demonstrations, including candlelit vigils for Atos victims, are planned in protest.

What the government is doing to disabled people

There are more than 10 million disabled people in the UK, who have been hit from various directions by coalition government policy – particularly through benefit reforms and local authority cuts. Taken together, warns Nick Coyle of Disability Alliance, ‘the combined effect will mean some people are cut adrift from the entire welfare state’.
Overall, the government has planned cuts of £2.17 billion (20 per cent) to disability living allowance (DLA), along with £2 billion of cuts to employment and support allowance (ESA). DLA can be claimed by those in or out of work to cover the extra costs of living with a disability; it is split into mobility and care components. ESA is for those out of work and can be claimed either by people in the ‘support’ group, who face the biggest barriers to working, or those in the ‘work-related activity’ group, who are expected to get back into work in the future.
ESA has been limited to one year for the latter group, while claimants must undergo ‘fitness for work’ assessments by the private firm Atos – these have been one of the most controversial, and damaging, aspects of the government’s reforms (see RP Feb/Mar 2011). Many are pushed off ESA and onto jobseekers’ allowance, ignoring the fact that the major barriers to work for disabled people remain transport and the workplace itself rather than lack of will. Activist John McArdle says this amounts to disability ‘being systematically denied in order to deprive us of the social security to which we’re entitled in a civilised society’.
Next year, the DLA will be scrapped in favour of a new benefit, the personal independence payment (PIP). In the process it is predicted that half a million people will lose their entitlement. The government has declared in advance that the switch will result in a 20 per cent cut to the benefit bill – leading campaigners to argue that this is proof that the cost reductions are determining how the eligibility criteria will be set, rather than reflecting people’s needs. Because the government claims it is focusing support on people ‘who need it most’, disability groups fear those with lesser needs could lose benefits, hitting their independence, wellbeing and quality of life. The phasing out of the independent living fund – a benefit that was specifically aimed at those with the greatest support needs – also contradicts the government rhetoric.
Local authority cuts to the adult social care budget have reached nearly £900 million this year, on top of the £1 billion cut last year, according to the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services. Councils are raising eligibility criteria for social care, in many cases restricting it to those with ‘critical’ or ‘substantial’ needs, increasing its cost and closing down services. Reductions in care packages have in several cases led individuals to take councils to court; legal aid cuts will make this recourse increasingly difficult in the future. Disabled services such as day centres have already lost significant funding. One in three local authorities have closed day services, while the costs of attending centres, including transport, have risen on average by 70 per cent. Mencap’s recent ‘Stuck at Home’ report found that one in four people with a learning disability now spend less than one hour outside their home every day.
True to style, the government has been willfully blind to damning evidence about its programme’s impacts on disabled people’s poverty, quality of life and mental health. In May, calls were dismissed for an assessment of the cumulative effect of the policy changes on the UK’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The minister for disabled people, Maria Miller, claimed the exercise, called for by a joint committee on human rights, disabled people and their organisations, would be too ‘complex’.

The impact on women

The paid-work-or-nothing attitude foisted on many disabled people, together with an increasing reliance on informal carers, is having a particular impact on women. Claire Glasman from WinVisible, a grassroots group for women with visible and invisible disabilities, explains:
‘With other groups we’ve opposed the phasing out of income support, which recognises that mothers and other carers are already working unwaged and should not be harassed into a waged job.
As disabled people and disabled women we feel that coping with a disability, and all the discrimination that you face, is an unwaged workload. This deserves to be recognised and to be cut down by adaptations, because in an inaccessible world everything is an enormous effort to do. As women we are also the ones very likely to be looking after children, the ones with time to be visiting elderly relatives in hospital, and so on.
In this culture of working really long hours, there’s less and less time for relationships and caring for people. As disabled women we’re often doing that kind of unwaged work and we want it recognised, and to be able to get money to live on, without having work conditions imposed on us.’

Atos sponsors the Paralympics? It’s enough to make you scream

admin — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 19:42:05 +0000

The US humourist Tom Lehrer famously greeted the news that Henry Kissinger had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 by declaring that satire was dead. The sponsorship of the 2012 Paralympic Games by Atos provokes a similar sentiment. For this is the very corporation that has been responsible for throwing hundreds of thousands of people with physical and mental impairments into the trauma of a compulsory ‘work capability assessment’ with the clearly political objective of slashing the benefits bill.
Terminally ill? What kind of excuse is that? Get to work. Tragically, the callous and frequently incompetent assessments have resulted in a spate of suicides. Welcome to the Paralympics, in association with the people who are making the lives of disabled people a living hell.
No doubt the Games will see a chorus of fatuous right-wing commentators saying that it shows what the disabled are capable of doing when they put their minds to something (with the pig-ignorant implication that most disabled people are just too lazy to work or live independently). Competitors from across the world will be coming to a country where disabled people are facing a media-fuelled climate of hostility that has seen disability hate crime reach record levels and an unprecedented series of government attacks, the latest of which include the plan to scrap the disability living allowance and the closure of at least half the Remploy factories, throwing thousands of disabled people out of work.
While the rich reward themselves with tax cuts and the banks carry on as normal, the people most in need of assistance from the state are punished for a crisis they had nothing to do with creating. It really is enough to make you scream. (Ironically, a version of Munch’s iconic painting parodied on our cover has just been sold for $119.9 million to a billionaire New York financier.)
But the scream is only the beginning. Because although they might be in a vulnerable position, the role played by disabled groups, far from being one of passive victims, is exemplary for the forceful and innovative forms of activism – both online and offline – and for the ability to lead collective resistance and direct action against the cuts. As we go to press, plans are in preparation to make the experience of disabled people in Britain visible to the international media coming over to cover the Paralympics. So, too, disabled activists will be an important constituency in mobilising for the TUC‑organised demonstration in October. This will be a key opportunity to demonstrate the breadth of popular opposition to the policies of a government that is failing so manifestly, even on its own terms.
David Cameron and George Osborne will be praying that a ‘good’ Olympics distracts everyone’s attention from the incompetence and divisions of the coalition government, which, following the defeat of the Lib Dems’ timetable for Lords reform, appears to be fracturing. Another satirist, Juvenal, mocked the politics of his day for consisting of little more than ‘bread and circuses’. Well, we’ve certainly had our share of circuses in 2012, starting with the queen’s diamond jubilee.
With the likes of Boris Johnson centre stage, all the world can see that Britain is a gold medallist at putting posh buffoons into positions of power. But beneath the fake union-jack-and-beefeaters image of Britishness beloved of the tourist industry (and how much ownership will Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and even the English regions feel towards the Olympics?), the reality of life in many parts of 21st-century Britain is grim. How many tourists will make it to those parts of the capital that saw an eruption of rioting, arson and looting this time last year? And how many people from the estates that border on the Olympic Park will have been able to afford a ticket to get inside? This corporate circus clearly isn’t meant for the likes of them.
This is the London the world isn’t meant to see. Families on housing benefit in the capital are being forced out of their homes, some of them out of the city entirely, to places where they have no connections whatsoever. Others are dependent on food parcels to feed themselves. Unemployed young people are forced to work without pay for corporations with turnovers running into billions just to retain their benefits. Cheek-by-jowl with child poverty, unemployment and homelessness sits the extreme affluence of city traders and mega-rich Russian oligarchs. And let’s not forget the Square Mile, international home of corrupt banking and the ‘wild west’ of deregulated financial services.
Of course, Britain is far from alone in experiencing the brutal effects of austerity. If things are bad here, how much worse is it for the Greek people, many of whom can’t even get vital medicines on prescription, while fascists openly threaten violence to immigrant communities? Despite the election of the conservative New Democracy party, the rise of Syriza shows that it is possible to build popular support for an alternative to austerity through active community organising and practical solidarity initiatives. It means challenging assumptions and self-consciously seeking to empower and involve groups who lie beyond the reach of traditional structures of workplace representation, just as the Unite union is tentatively attempting in the UK. As the example of disability activism shows, what at first sight might seem like barriers to effective action can in fact provide the stimuli for creative and innovative forms of resistance.

Remploy: Factories floored

admin — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 10:00:39 +0000

‘The stakes are high, workers are willing to strike to save their jobs, and they have to because the government simply aren’t listening,’ says Phil Davies, national secretary of the GMB union. He is talking about the thousands of workers battling plans to close 36 of Remploy’s 54 factories this summer, with compulsory redundancies for 1,752 people. Of these, 1,518 are disabled. The remaining 18 sites will close soon after unless buyers can be found. With only a handful returning a profit, most are unlikely to do so.
Set up in 1945, the state-owned company Remploy is the UK’s leading specialist employer of disabled people, with some 3,000 people on its payroll. Despite pleas from unions, workers and their families, Remploy executives say they have no alternative but to press ahead with the closures and sell offs, arguing that their hand has been forced by cuts in government funding. The company is making a loss of more than £50million per year, although union officials say this could be reduced to £7million.
Glen Holdom, GMB officer for Remploy staff, says of the plans that ‘taking jobs from disabled people should not be tolerated in a civilised society. It will not improve the country’s financial situation – it may well make it worse.’ Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite union, has denounced the action as ‘barbaric . . . the government has sunk to a new low.’
So far there have been 60 expressions of interest in the factories from private companies, but many potential bidders are said to have asked for more financial support if they are to take on the risk of the loss-making units. To sweeten the deal, private companies have been offered a short-term £10 million subsidy of up to a third of the wages of the disabled workers.
Unions are unhappy that there has been no consultation and that the identities of bidders have not been revealed. ‘We’re entitled to know who has bid for the factories. It’s our members’ livelihoods at stake,’ says Phil Davies. ‘It’s open season for the asset stripper – we’ve not heard of a single bid where someone wants to take over lock, stock and barrel.’
Life after layoffs
Despite unemployment standing at a 16-year high, the government is expecting the employees facing redundancy to find jobs in mainstream employment. The accounts of those who lost their jobs in the first round of Remploy layoffs, started in 2008 by the Labour government when it shut 28 factories, tell a different story.
In an interview with the Daily Express two former employees, Beverly and Robert Stevens, who accepted voluntary redundancy in 2008, told of the reality of life outside the factories. Mrs Stevens, 49, said she and her husband had been on work placements and gone for interviews but their search for jobs proved fruitless. ‘We have completed various placements with various employers,’ said Mrs Stevens, ‘all of which are happy to use our skills for a short space of time but none of which are willing to employ us and pay our wages.’
Mr Stevens had work placements as a kitchen assistant and shelf stacker at a major supermarket, which failed to offer a job after three years of service. Mrs Stevens had placements as a receptionist and an administration assistant.
She believes their chance of getting mainstream jobs is ‘nil’. ‘Neither of us wants to have to remain on benefits for the rest of our working lives. We have always worked until the closure of the factory.’ Eighty-six per cent of those who lost their jobs during this period remain unemployed.
Other stories are equally distressing. Tony, a worker at Barking Remploy, told the GMB, ‘We don’t want to leave here and be sitting around at home doing nothing. If it shuts down I don’t know what job I’m going to find. I have a job here where we have friends for life.’
His mum Cathy added that Tony was born with a learning disability and went to a special school. ‘He worked in the mainstream before he came to Remploy but was treated very badly, and had a very unhappy time. He came to Remploy 13 years ago. He works really hard and adores his job. It would be devastating for him and the family if the factory closes.’
Similar stories are echoed many times over by former and current Remploy employees.
Justifying the closures
It is perhaps unsurprising that the safe environment and financial security that the Remploy factories provide is not to this government’s taste. Less predictably, they have other critics too. Last year Liz Sayce, then chief executive of Radar, the Royal Association for Disability Rights (now Disability Rights UK), controversially called Remploy factories ‘ghettoes’ operating a ‘glass ceiling … with non-disabled people largely running the organisation and disabled people working in it’.
A government-commissioned report released by the charity is now being used to justify the closures. The work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith was quoted as saying the state should not fund ‘Victorian-era segregated employment’. The Department for Work and Pensions added that: ‘For many, Remploy factories can lead to institutionalisation and isolation of disabled people.’
Tracy Lazard from the Inclusion London charity says that fighting the closures is in no way an endorsement of segregated employment. But she argues that ‘at a time of recession, when non‑disabled people cannot find jobs and when benefit cuts are pushing genuine disabled claimants off benefits and into poverty, it is irresponsible to remove meaningful employment from thousands of disabled people.’
Phil Davies goes one step further. He says that some national charities, including Scope, Radar and Mencap, have acted in a ‘disgraceful manner’. He believes that the charities have tried to ‘feather their own nests’. He says that ‘last time there were people laid off from Remploy they were given placements. Where were they placed? Inside charity shops as free labour and that’s what they are hoping for again.’
Need for reform
It is clear from public meetings and internet message boards that there is a need for reform. Specifically there is much ill feeling towards management at the organisation. Campaigners feel that Remploy workers have been mismanaged by non-disabled people. Senior managers took home £1.8 million in bonuses in 2011 while the factory floor workers were under pay restraint. The average wage of senior management currently stands at £50,000 a year compared with £13,000 for the average worker, with some earning as much as £205,000 per year.
Martin, a Remploy worker, argues that: ‘Remploy is top heavy with non-disabled directors and senior managers who make no contribution to the Remploy factory network.’ Phil Davies agrees: ‘About 80 per cent of senior management are able bodied . . . And they have bled the company dry.’
Unions and workers have now released an alternative strategy for Remploy. By streamlining the management and other measures, they say it could save around £43million per year.
This is the fifth such document that trade unions have produced over the past 20 years as the organisation has come under threat from various governments. It sets out 10 key points for reducing costs and restructuring the organisation, making it less top heavy and more responsive to the needs of its disabled employees. These include the re-establishment of links with the armed forces to provide work for troops injured in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a greater emphasis on community links with the introduction of crèche facilities and space for small local businesses.
With the government expected to dismiss the alternative plan out of hand, thoughts are turning to the possibility of more radical action. Following a 79 per cent vote in favour of industrial action the workers have been out on strike. There is even talk of occupying the factories.

Organising ourselves

admin — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 23:32:29 +0000

Why talk about this now?
There has been a massive upsurge in community organising since the coalition government started dismantling public services, welfare and secure housing. Hundreds of new groups have formed to defend the resources their communities rely on. But community organising is at risk of being hijacked as a concept. In February, the government awarded a £15 million contract for community organisers to ‘play a major role in delivering the Big Society’.
Described by David Cameron in the run-up to the election as an ‘army’, we wait to see what the onslaught of these government-sponsored ‘community organisers’ will involve. Jess Steele, the programme director of Locality, the organisation that won the bid, regularly criticises local spending cuts on her blog while passionately proclaiming that the ‘big society’ is not Tory or Labour but ours. Embarrassing, then, that Locality had to admit it approached Iain Duncan Smith’s think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, as a partner in the bid, although it declined to be involved. Since Jess Steele tells us that community organising starts with listening, would they have organised around Duncan Smith’s mandatory labour for welfare claimants? This seems unlikely given that the same government that is dismantling the welfare system is paying for these organisers to be trained.
Many communities are experiencing the big society as a synonym for replacing vital public services with unpaid and less accountable workers. It is hard to see how government-sponsored organisers would be in any position to build communities’ power to challenge this. While Jess Steele may hope to redefine the big society, it seems far more likely that the government’s agenda will define what Locality can achieve – especially if it hopes to get more funding in future.
As David Milner from Islington Poverty Action Group commented about Locality’s community organisers: ‘Is it to ensure that communities actually remain disorganised and present no threat to government plans? They will organise compliance not resistance. They will do this by diverting any enthusiasm into “good works”, such as conservation and helping the infirm. Their message will be “We can help you, you cannot help yourselves.”’
How we can help ourselves
By contrast, the roundtable discussion was held to find out what community organising means to independent groups organising against the government’s spending cuts. Jim Cranshaw from Oxford Save Our Services described how local campaigning has led to ‘the big society idea being ridiculed in Oxford in the press’. After a diverse campaign in Oxfordshire, involving members of all major political parties, there has been a substantial u-turn on the closure of 20 libraries. All will be saved, though a few will not remain publicly owned. The money will come from central government: ‘They just happened to find it as Cameron was put under a lot of public pressure in the national newspapers.’
Initially ‘some of the groups were very keen on big society solutions. They came from rich areas and could get rich donors to fund a voluntary-run library.’ But effective links were made and at one area meeting (part of the local council’s democracy, now abolished), all groups repudiated taking private money to run their libraries, telling the council they wanted them to remain public. ‘That is going to be more effective at maintaining funding in the future: take the hit now, show solidarity and then try to preserve public services.’
Hackney Housing Group finds that collectively challenging the council’s housing decisions gets results. ‘We’ve seen lots of people who joined our group when they were homeless who now have permanent council housing,’ said Ellie Schling. The group has developed a direct action approach to challenge the routine failure of the local housing office to offer emergency accommodation and make homeless decisions within the legal time limit. ‘We offer each other advice from our own experiences and go down to the housing office in small groups and stick up for each other, which is really effective.’
The sister group, Haringey Housing Action, has achieved similar success. Jane Laporte described one action inside the housing office: ‘[We were] trying to get a woman housed before the bailiffs were due to come round. We came inside with a banner and refused to leave until we got to speak to the person who could make the decision. She got housed that day, even though we had been told categorically that wasn’t going to happen.’
Organising, not controlling
Jim Cranshaw attributed the success of Oxford Save our Services to ‘not being controlling in the way we organise and being very open and participatory . . . We try to find out how people want to campaign and what they want to campaign on and then support and empower them to do that.’ While this may limit strategic focus, the trade off is that the campaign has much more capacity to take on a range of issues.
This is something Lani Parker of Islington Disabled People Against Cuts (IDPAC) also identified as important. If groups embed an approach that genuinely values everyone’s voice and contribution, then new people are welcomed without putting them in the spotlight in an embarrassing way. ‘I always feel inspired if I go to a meeting where that happens,’ she said.
Many of the groups present at the roundtable were influenced by consensus decision-making practice, which means working towards all voices being heard in order to reach decisions that everyone can accept. However, the groups shared a pragmatic approach rather than a blind commitment to a set of hand signals or processes. Staying flexible and trying to work in a way that information, tasks and power are shared is important. Meetings work better where ‘go rounds’ (a chance to hear everyone in the room speak without interruption) are used, facilitation (or chairing) and other roles are rotated, and working groups allow people to contribute to what they’re interested in. Regular skill shares and trainings enable participation and the movement to grow.
Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) is adept at finding creative ways to involve people in decisions. Linda Burnip commented: ‘A lot of disabled people are isolated and confined because they haven’t got the right support to get out from their homes, so we very much use social networking. If we want to know what people think we message all our Facebook members and put something on our website and they all send back messages. Then we work from the responses we get.’
Southall Black Sisters, an advice and campaigning organisation, ‘set up support groups which are casual, more about discussing issues at a pace that is much slower and more accessible than in policy meetings when you are getting on with decisions,’ according to Pragna Patel. ‘So there are two types of forums and one feeds the other and hopefully leads the other but the pace needs to be different.’
The methods may vary, but the emphasis is clear: everyone can contribute and everyone is valued. There may be a tension between speed of action and involving people in decisions, but experience shows that actions are more effective when more people understand why they are taking place and are involved in making them happen. Where professional community organisers often import a methodology from the US that focuses on finding or creating ‘community leaders’, with these groups ‘every single one is a leader’, as Pragna Patel put it.
There is a trust that in giving up the desire to control what happens, more and better things will be able to flourish. Another good example came from Oxford: ‘What we’ve done at the moment is train a lot of young people in youth centres that are getting closed down and now they are out there doing direct actions, doing media stunts, we just support them in doing that. We are not trying to do everything ourselves but trying to increase the overall size of the movement.’
Nothing about us without us
In trying to build a movement that challenges imbalances of power internally as well as externally, it remains important to organise as groups experiencing particular oppressions or structural inequalities. In Linda Burnip words: ‘For us, part of setting up DPAC was that we would be campaigning as disabled people for ourselves and not being spoken for by other organisations. Particularly we have problems with a number of the charities who actually make a lot of money out of disabled people and more or less treat us as commodities.’ Helen Lowe from Women Against Fundamentalism argues, ‘It is so important there is a voice that can speak out clearly on behalf of women, even when it engages with other issues which affect men and women.’
If you are committed to making sure voices of people who experience structural inequality are included, how does that influence which groups you make alliances with? Everyone who has organised in their community has at some stage or another encountered challenges in building alliances, whether due to differences of personality, politics or organising approaches. Given this, it was refreshing that no single blueprint and no hard and fast maxims of ‘Stay away from that group’ or ‘Never work with them’ emerged.
Pragna Patel said: ‘Alliances in the abstract do not make sense. It’s got to be in terms of what you are doing, what are the objectives – you’ve come into the alliance to fight what? Inevitably there are going to be times when all the groups coincide. That’s okay because it is very short-lived and they are not monopolising the whole of the agenda.’
Nevertheless, it is important to think about whether working with some groups will exclude others’ involvement. Helen Lowe pointed out that if, for example, a religious group want to join a coalition ‘they are welcome to do so but there are ground rules about mutual respect, so you don’t have a situation where [gay] people feel threatened by people when they are supposed to be working together in an alliance with them.’
Organising without experts
Thousands of people are now organising in their communities without the aid of Cameron’s army and while avoiding being co-opted into his big society. They are building support and campaigning networks that do not lay the groundwork for replacing public services, instead strengthening our assertion of our rights to decent housing, welfare and services. By sharing information and experience, we can build our power to challenge the cuts and fight for more resources.
As Hackney Housing Group has seen, you don’t need experts to organise you. ‘Hackney Housing Group members have gone to the housing office without anyone who speaks good English and won housing,’ said Ellie Schling. ‘We knew what to do because we’ve gone to apply there ourselves. We don’t need to be legal experts. The importance of people organising around their own situations is going to grow . . . I can’t see what people are going to be able to do apart from fight.’
None of the groups involved in the roundtable discussion had pretensions to steer or control what others are doing. All had a genuine and inspiring commitment to share what has worked for them and learn from others.
While each group’s particular focus may seem limited when the cuts are so wide-ranging, Harry McGill from Welfare Action Hackney argued that ‘I see our group doing more . . . focusing on our particular area and [when we are ready] we will back up and be part of a larger movement that will have the force to move things on in the future.’ n
Anne-Marie O’Reilly is a member of the London Coalition Against Poverty, a coalition of mutual support groups that organises to defend and extend our rights to decent housing, wages and benefits. Read the full discussion at http://organisingcommunities.wordpress.com

The bedrock of autonomy

admin — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 23:34:31 +0000

Now entering my fifth year of living with multiple myeloma, a haematological cancer, I reflect back on a roller-coaster ride of symptoms, treatments and side effects. Whatever else this experience has brought, it’s been an education. But what exactly have I learned? To begin with, that any glib answer to the question misses the core of the experience – the sometimes murky dialectic of being ill, which is a social as well as physical condition.
For me, the experience has led to a heightened awareness of our intricate dependence on others, as well as our deep-seated need for independence.
Sitting with my IV drip, I like to think about all the human labour and ingenuity that come together in this medical moment. The inventory is endless.
The first circle of dependence is immediate and sometimes intimate. Partners, friends, doctors, nurses, cleaners, porters. I’m also dependent on a vast network of people I never see: pathologists, pharmacists, IT engineers, equipment repairers and supplies managers. Everyone who has anything to do with maintaining the supply of medications or the functioning of equipment or getting me to and from hospital. Everyone who makes sure the lights are on and the building safe. The whole intricate ballet that is a functioning hospital. One misstep, one breach in the rhythm, one failure to be at the appointed spot at the appointed time, and the whole breaks down, with potentially dire consequences.
Beyond that, I’m dependent on a long history of scientific development to which individuals and institutions in many countries have contributed. From the British chemist Bence Jones identifying the protein associated with multiple myeloma in the 1840s to the pathologist and one-time film star Justine Wanger developing the IV drip in the 1930s. From the Irish physician Francis Rynd, who invented the hollow needle in the mid-19th century, to Don Thomas of the University of Washington who pioneered bone marrow transplants in the 1980s. From the first experiments with chemotherapy (a by-product of chemical warfare) in the 1940s, through the protracted struggle to master the art of toxicity (a dialectic of creation and destruction if there ever was one), to the discovery of proteasome inhibitors in the 1990s and the subsequent creation of new ‘targeted therapies’, like the one I’m currently receiving.
Without innumerable essential advances in immunology, pathology, biochemistry, chemical engineering, statistics and metallurgy, to name but a few, I wouldn’t be where I am now – in fact, I wouldn’t be at all.
The story of scientific advance is also, of course, a story of errors, false hopes, cynical exploitation and misappropriated resources. We’ve come a long way from the 2nd century AD when Galen, doyen of Roman medicine, declared that cancer was caused by melancholia; or from the treatment – rhubarb and orange peel – given to the first patients diagnosed with myeloma in the 1840s. Even as recently as the 1950s myeloma patients were given a standard urethane therapy that was later shown to be completely ineffective.
The drip flowing into my vein is drawn from a river with innumerable tributaries. It is an entirely rational, intelligible process, but no less miraculous for that.
Not just hard science
And it’s not just a story of hard science. Alongside that, and necessary to it, is the whole history of the hospital (which for many generations was primarily a place you went to die, not to be cured), of the discipline of nursing, and of a host of social developments that made it possible to convert raw science into practical care.
I’m acutely conscious of how dependent I am on those who built and sustained the NHS, including, pre-eminently, generations of labour movement activists and socialists. And as I sit with my IV drip I’m mindful of those in government and business who would smash the delicate mechanism of the hospital and shatter the network of dependence that sustains me. (Among other things, the disassembling of the NHS runs counter to the thrust of advanced thinking on patient-centred care, which stresses a multi-disciplinary and integrated approach.)
I’m being kept alive by the contributions of so many currents of human labour, thought, struggle, desire, imagination. By the whole Enlightenment tradition but not only that: by other, older traditions of care, solidarity, mutuality, of respect for human life and compassion for human suffering. The harnessing of science, technology and advanced forms of organisation and information to compassionate ends is by no means automatic. It leans on and is only made possible by the conflict-riddled history of ethical and political development.
Beautiful as it is, this network of dependence is also frightening. Restrictions in capacity and mobility are hugely frustrating and relying on others to supplement them is not a straightforward business – for patient or carer. As a cancer patient I often feel I’m engaged in a never-ending battle for autonomy. I fight it out in relation to institutions (including hospitals), experts (who claim to know more about my situation than I do), medications (an endless struggle to find an elusive balance), means of mobility, forms of diet. Not to mention the vital effort to live a life beyond illness, to hold on to that kernel of freedom that makes you who you are.
Struggle for autonomy
Paradoxically the struggle for autonomy is one you can’t win on your own. You need allies, and part of being a carer is being an ally, a comrade, not a nursemaid or controller. Independence is the stuff of life. It’s motion, energy, free will, the capacity for self-development. But you can achieve it only through dependence on others, individuals and institutions, past and present. That’s a truth driven home to the cancer patient, but applicable to all of us. As is the realisation that the most rewarding use of the independence thus secured is in the service of a creative and compassionate engagement with others, building higher dependencies – new networks of mutuality.
Illness is anything but an ideology-free zone. Certainly not for the government, which aims to divide sufferers into acute cases deserving of support and less acute ones that must be forced out into the labour market, where our only function will be to undercut wages and job security. This is one among many reasons why resistance to the attacks on benefits for people with disabilities and long-term illnesses ought to be a central plank of the anti‑cuts movement.
The crisis facing the disabled and the ill is an extreme form of the crisis facing all those dependent on the public sector in whatever manner (the majority of the populace). We don’t want charity – the form of dependence that makes independence impossible – but rights and the resources to exercise those rights. Speaking for myself, taking part in anti-cuts activity is some of the best therapy available: an unashamed acknowledgment of social dependence and at the same time a declaration of political-spiritual independence.
Being ill makes salient some critical features of the underlying human condition, not least the dialectic of dependence and independence. Even in the most despairing moments, the utmost dependency, the politics of illness turns out (for me) to be a politics of struggle and hope, the harbinger of a solidarity flowering out of our common but always idiosyncratic weaknesses. n
Contending for the Living is Mike Marqusee’s regular column for Red Pepper. www.mikemarqusee.com

Atos: tick-box tyranny

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 12:41:47 +0000

Successive governments have fed us the line that they want to help those with disabilities to become ‘more independent’ by giving them the ‘incentive and opportunity’ to work. To help them in this noble aim, they have enlisted a company called Atos.
But this public-private partnership acts less like a professional carer aiding a client and more like a Metropolitan police officer tipping a disabled person out of their wheelchair.
Atos uses a computer system to assess disabled people’s ‘fitness to work’ for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). This assessment consists of tick-boxes on a screen, and it doesn’t allow for any medical or qualitative evidence. In fact it often undermines medical evidence.
Claimants complain they are asked irrelevant questions – for example, sufferers of depression are asked if they can load and unload a dishwasher. The system nets the company a massive £500 million from its seven-year contract with the DWP, but as you might expect with this sort of unscientific approach to assessment, the company’s record is terrible. There are 8,000 tribunals hearing ‘fitness to work’ appeals every month across the UK – and 40 per cent of decisions are being reversed.
In November, this poor treatment of claimants was recognised in the House of Commons following the release of Professor Malcolm Harrington’s report on work capability assessments. The report concluded: ‘Atos has damaged the public perception of medical assessments, and has also created a serious risk of maladministration of incapacity benefit checks.’
MPs called on the government to ‘act swiftly so that medical assessments are more localised, humane and sympathetic’. But the system remains unchanged.
Despite its poor record, Atos – a French multinational with offices all over the world – keeps on winning contracts. It has expanded quickly by buying up smaller companies, including KPMG Consulting and Sema Group in the UK.
In total Atos now employs 50,000 staff and operates in 50 countries. The company is deeply involved in military applications: it has contracts with the Chinese, French, Dutch and UK militaries.
Atos eats up tax revenue by ensuring that the firms it takes over lobby for and win government contracts – all the while setting up subsidiaries in tax havens, as Ethical Consumer magazine has revealed.
In Britain, Atos has 6,500 staff and is one of the top 20 suppliers to the state. As well as the DWP contract, it has two substantial IT contracts with the NHS, one with the Ministry of Defence Veterans Agency and one with the Scottish government, delivering more than 100 projects annually. Last year the NHS alone paid the firm more than £36.5 million.
Beyond IT, the company claims to be the biggest provider of medical services in the UK after the NHS, with 2,500 staff on its books. This includes direct provision of healthcare services, including two NHS walk-in centres in Manchester and Canary Wharf in east London, as well as GP and nursing services for NHS Tower Hamlets. It also provides various services to individual NHS trusts.
Atos was also at the forefront of the now defunct ID cards scheme. It advocated the use of automated fingerprint identification software, used by the US Department of Homeland Security among others.
As if all that isn’t enough, the company even provides software and communication technology for oil and gas exploration, and has been selected to provide the Dungeness B nuclear power plant in Kent with a new computer system.
With its tentacles in so many pies, it’s perhaps no surprise that Atos is doing pretty well. In the first quarter of 2010 alone, its revenue hit the 1,231 million-euro mark, while last year the company had revenue in excess of 5 billion euros.
After all, hoovering up taxpayers’ money is a lucrative business.