Delivering employment to the disabled

I would like to explore what is essential for the societal inclusion and employment of people with disabilities in western societies, like Australia. What measures that can be imposed on people with disabilities to more fully deliver the basic human rights of societal inclusion and employment?

In the contemporary era, pragmatic social democracy is best represented in the Australian context by the work of Hugh Stretton. This is challenged by the emergence of neo-liberalism and the third way. Neo-liberalism is a political economic theory and practice that emerged in the 1960s, and has increased in prominence at the policy level since the 1980s.

The aim of neo-liberalism is to put into question all collective structures capable of obstructing the logic of the pure market. Neo-liberalism aims to achieve progress by combining the operation of a free market with measures of social justice that will, at least in theory, also contribute to economic growth.

Emerging out of pragmatic social democracy and neo-liberalism, the third way is a political model that its supporters argue encapsulates the best of both old left and new right politics. At the same time, however, central to the third way is its support of the neo-liberal faith in the market, in particular, the idea that unfettered markets will benefit all of society.

UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is a strong advocate of the third way theory. He argues that people get out of the system what they put into it, based on a supposedly neutral concept of individual merit.

Most third way and neo-liberal sympathisers conclude that a merit-based system will tend to increase the social mobility of the socially excluded. Social mobility is, in theory, supposed to spawn a new era in equal opportunity, one that offers all people every chance to fulfil their own potential.

However, in reality, such a merit-based system only offers shifting patterns of inequality, unfairly exalting the rich, while condemning the poor to false hopes of individualised social mobility. That is, social democracy promotes societal change, whereas the third way and proponents of meritocracy focus on the individual.

Many forms of social exclusion related to disability are emerging from the value system and policy prescriptions of a market driven economy. The political economy, that is provided by a market driven economy, is a fundamental source of the problems faced by people with disabilities, which to a large degree are manifestations of problems directly related to prejudicial or discriminatory attitudes.

The market driven system puts profits before people and this claim is exacerbated in the case of the employment of people with disabilities, as many employers characteristically assume that they will encounter lowered productivity and higher costs in employing a worker with disabilities.

Affirmative action for people with disabilities

Affirmative action is a political and policy approach which allows for positive steps to be taken to promote equal employment opportunity for socially defined groups who have been subjected to structural discrimination, according to factors such as gender, disability, age, and race. Affirmative action legislation stipulates that active steps be taken to promote equal opportunity in a more pro-active way than antidiscrimination legislation which seeks to eliminate unequal treatment as experienced by individuals.

The goal of affirmative action is to eliminate disadvantages for which the sufferers of employment discrimination cannot legitimately be held responsible. Affirmative action programs seek to hold societies accountable for structural discrimination impacting on socially defined groups, by requiring employers to take active steps to provide equal employment opportunities for groups subjected to discrimination in employment.

Frank Stilwell and other advocates of affirmative action argue that it is about more than just a redistribution of income, it is about life chances. People with disabilities, in many cases because of unjustified stereotypes, are often excluded from these life chances. Legally enforceable affirmative action for people with disabilities can mandate that positions be filled by a certain percentage of prospective employees with disabilities.

However, this approach has faced challenges, not only from the private sector and from government, but also from within the disability rights movement. It is felt the act of Affirmative Action will promote discriminatory stereotypes and stigmas within the workforce, which only hires people with disabilities because it is regulated to do so. But this form of discriminatory stereotypes and stigmas can be regulated against through legally enforceable political correctness. In the long run this will promote the employment of people with disabilities as a societal norm.

The pragmatic wisdom of Marta Russell concerning the employment of people with disabilities is identified in the following quote. As Russell (cited in Hershey 2000) puts it:

The free-marketer elements in the disability movement decided that all we needed was an “equal opportunity”, as opposed to affirmative action to remedy past patterns of discrimination. I think that was a huge mistake. It would definitely be revolutionary to make corporations hire us, and to prevent corporations from firing employees upon disablement. Affirmative action may be only incrementalist reform - which admittedly does not solve the question of full employment - but it has gotten some results for other minorities.

In other words, Russell identifies the concept of equal opportunity, in terms of an antidiscrimination focus, with the competitive market system. That is, a system where there is supposedly no discrimination, but where the employer may choose the employee according to individual merit. Such an approach denies the structural relations that influence what is available to individuals, and downplays the fact that merit, as a concept is a social construction. Of particular relevance to this discussion, merit as a concept in most contexts carries a biomedical assumption of being able-bodied, narrowly defined, thereby excluding all those labelled as living with a disability.

That is a disabled person’s theoretical right to an accommodation is really no right at all; it is dependent upon the employer's cost-benefit analysis. The bottom line in private business is to accumulate profits and pay the costs involved in making them. The political economic context of free market capitalism, and the promotion of the market by neo-liberal and third way policy, provides a significant obstacle to the implementation of affirmative action policies.

Another policy approach to the employment of people with disabilities to be discussed relates to the government fulfilling the role of employer of last resort.

Government as employer of last resort

In order to bring more people with disabilities into the social inclusion that employment offers it is necessary to expand the work environment beyond the capitalist profit motive and ensure the public sectors act as the employers of last resort.

The use of the government as employer of last resort is to be the cornerstone of full employment, acknowledging employment as a fundamental economic and human right. This basic idea is that the government will employ anybody with an impairment who is ready and willing to work at an appropriate wage and who has been unable to find work through the private sector.

The level of wage paid by the government as employer of last resort is a matter for social policy, as health care or other benefits are likely to be included. Such a program will be based on the consideration of a number of political and economic factors. These decisions are not fixed forever and the wage and benefits package of the Employer of Last Resort work force, will be adjusted over time.

Before the social policy making capacity of the state was constrained by neo-liberal reforms, government was the main and most appropriate instrument for such an employment policy. The government is able to create an infinitely elastic demand for labour at a minimum wage rate that does not depend on either the long or short term profit expectations of private business. Many government controlled enterprises are capable of divorcing themselves from the profit making cycle.

To give one example of this model in action, as a person with a disability in 1983, I sought employment with the Australian federal government under a scheme designed specifically for people with disabilities. At the time, this was the only major employer to whom a prospective employee with disabilities could apply without being stereotyped as non functional, or as a liability likely to reduce an employer’s profits.

I gained employment by passing an intellectual testing process that was flexible within equal opportunity guide lines. The government has since continually reformed its program as employer of people with disabilities. Recently released Australian statistics as reported by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission attest to this:

The number of people with disabilities employed by the Commonwealth government has declined significantly over the last ten years. In 2003-2004, people with disabilities made up 3.8 per cent of ongoing Australian Public Service employees, down from 5.8 per cent ten years ago.

Peter Botsman is a passionate thinker about the social exclusion caused by disability. His thoughts on disability policy are driven by his theory of the third way political agenda, which is depicted by his satirical suggestion that “Government is the last resort”, at the ACROD 2003 National Convention.

Botsman, a former CEO of the ALP think tank The Whitlam Institute, is a strong advocate of the third way political and ideological agenda, which discounts the collective capacities of government and the public sector to ameliorate the social and economic exclusion of people with disabilities.

The statement that “government is the last resort” proposes instead that the individual is the arbiter of their own past and destiny. While such a view has the benefit of identifying people with disabilities as having agency, it overlooks the necessary role of government in creating a space for the operation of such agency.

Botsman’s approach fails to place much hope in the collective ability of government to devise appropriate social policies or regulations in the intervening requirements of the parliament pertaining to people with disabilities. Botsman’s third way political economic agenda thus implies that there is an extended invisible hand in the market place to assist people with disabilities who want to make the move to a more inclusive future.

Relevant to this context, and providing a critical counterpoint to Botsman, Mickey Kaus (1994) argues that:

[t]he military, after all, is relatively inefficient. Like a public works program, it’s a big bureaucracy. It isn’t subject to a lot of competitive market forces. Yet when we need it to fight, it’s usually gotten the job done. And we tolerate its inefficiency because there is no better alternative. You can’t fight a war with private enterprise. And, as I suspect [the political economy of the third way] will discover, you can't “end welfare as we know it” by relying on private enterprise either. (Kaus 1994:3)

In conclusion, my knowledge and experience of disability allows me to argue that the employment policies of affirmative action and government as employer of last resort, provide practical solutions to the problems of social and economic exclusion and un-employment for people with disabilities.