A jobs guarantee intensifies the exclusion of disabled people

(Steven - Ph.D. student, Centre for Disability Studies University of Leeds, “Access to work or liberation from work? Disabled people, autonomy, and post-work politics,” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 4.2, 2015, https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/212/398)

One notable dissenter from this view within UKdisability discourse was the late Paul Abberley, who from 1996 to 2002 progressively elaborated the argument that ‘classical social theories’ – in which he included Marxism – were fundamentally inadequate as the intellectual basis of a liberation politics of disability because of their focus on work as constitutive of an essential human identity and as an essential requirement for full membership of society (Abberley. 1996; 2002). Abberley shared with his contemporaries (such as Finkelstein and Oliver) the starting point of a Marxist-influenced historical analysis of the origins of disablement in its modern forms. Thus, he did not seek to “deny that the origins of our oppression, even for those with jobs, lie in our historical exclusion, as a group, from access to work, nor... to oppose campaigns for increasing access to employment” (Abberley 1996, pp. 76–77).Instead, he sought to “point out that a thoroughgoing materialist analysis of disablement today must recognise that full integration of impaired people in social production can never constitute the future to which we as a movement aspire” (Abberley 1996, p. 77). Abberley argued that “even in a society which did make profound and genuine attempts to integrate impaired people into the world of work, some would still be excluded by their impairment”vii and that “a society may be willing, and in certain circumstances become eager, to absorb a portion of its impaired population into the workforce, yet this can have the effect of maintaining and perhaps intensifying its exclusion of the remainder” (1996, p. 71). Therefore “an inclusion which is dependent upon employment is by no means advantageous to all disabled people, since it is not likely in modern labour markets that all disabled people could find or reliably retain employment” (Abberley, 2002, p. 134). The truth of these statements is evident in the many portrayals in mainstream British news media of disabled people who do manage to succeed in the world of employment, with an implicit (and sometimes explicit) message that all disabled people are therefore capable of being employed, and thus that anyone who claims that they are genuinely unable to work (either due to impairment or disablement) must be lying or faking, and therefore a member of the ‘undeserving poor’, subject to vilification as the folk devil of the ‘scrounger’ (Garthwaite, 2011). Abberley (1996) further argued that the “work -based model of social membership and identity” is inextricably linked to ‘cure ’- oriented medical model approaches to disabled people, implying a “value judgement upon the undesirability of impaired modes of being” (p.74), and ultimately implying that disablement can only be fully overcome by eradicating impairment itself. Thus a truly liberatory, social model approach to overcoming disability must “reject work as crucially definitional of social membership and [be] sceptical about some of the progressive imperatives implicit in modern science” (Abberley, 2002, p. 135). In his final version of his argument, Abberley specifically – and presciently – warns against “the over-enthusiastic espousal of work-based programmes for overcoming the exclusion of disabled people which leave welfare systems unchanged or, worse still, depleted” (Abberley, 2002, pp. 135–6). More recently, Canadian disabled activist and writer A.J. Withers makes a similar criticism of the UPIAS stance on work and benefits, describing their position as “highly problematic on pragmatic grounds” (Withers, 2012, p. 89) because, regardless of whether disabled people are theoretically capable of paid work in a more accessible and less discriminatory society, in currently existing capitalism they are systematically discriminated against by employers, and therefore many have no choice but to rely on state benefits for their basic needs. Withers (2012) goes on to argue, echoing Abberley, that an exclusive campaign focus on “participation in paid employment (i.e., participation within the capitalist system)...continues to perpetuate the capitalist value that people’s worth is connected to their productivity and participation in paid employment” (p. 90, emphasis in original).