Targetting the poor, the sick, the disabled….

It saddens me to read the opinions of many members of the public that believe what the politicians and bankers are telling them, when the evidence is clear to see, but people refuse to look, investigate or think.

Thankfully some do, but whilst the majority dont, the government will capitalise on it.

Perhaps one day, those who think people on IB are scroungers etc, and the reforms are fair, will be in a position where they need support and help themselves, by that time it will be to late, and they will only have themselves to blame for not thinking when they had the opportunity.

Only people already getting IB will keep it until they can go through the new checks. so far most people are being told they can work.

NO one now gets IB who sign on the sick….

I’ve had clinical depression on and off for going on 25 years, and the most time I’ve missed from work because of it is 6 weeks and that was due to a stressfull event which knocks many “normal” people sideways psychologically.
I could tick the box saying “do you consider yourself disabled” ? at work but I choose not to. I could probably get medical retirement, I could definately get incapacity benefit. Even if I completely crashed and couldn’t do my current job , I could still do *something* productive. Most people on incapacity befeit are diagnosed with “non-specific anxiety” or moderate depression neither of which, in my view, are sufficiently and permanently inacapacitating enough to excluade them from any and all work.

I agree with you that, especially in the past “poor people are crazy, rich people are eccentric”

Labour are pushing people on IB because this is the higher benefits, I’ve not met anyone on a means tested benefits which are being asked to attend interviews yet.

but where are the employers because I cannot find them…

I’ve suffered from mental illness most of my adult life but that has always been exacerbated by unemployment: unstructured days, feelings of helplessness and lack of social contact (as well as grinding poverty) aren’t going to help you fight depression, any more than telling someone with back problems to go home and sleep it off.

Unemployment is one of the major CAUSES of mental illness.

My disablity is simple a lesion of the spinal cord which has left me dead from the waist down, sadly it has left me feeling pain, pain for no reason. sadly the spinal cord is now affecting my neck and arms.

Disablity is not just mental health.

The population in general is getting healthier and living longer , far fewer people are injured at work or disabled through industrial diseases than 20 years ago, so why would the proportion of the working aged population deemed unfit to work (meaning any work, i.e can’t even sit in a call centre or flip a burger) be *increasing* unless a proportion are in fact not really that sick.

At least one of the reasons is that we have a considerably more objective definition of ‘that sick’ these days, and because we have extended it to include the lower classes. Middle- and upper-class people with mental difficulties have always been in the category of ‘people we look after’; poor people with similar difficulties were in the category of ‘people we lock up’.

In the modern era we know that 1 in 4 adults will suffer a diagnosed mental illness at least once. Bear in mind how the puritan association of mental disorder with possession still infects our society, and its effect on the numbers: a lot of people will not admit to such disorders because society teaches them that it is weakness not illness.

In the modern era we also know that the workforce are as deserving of medical recognition as the entrepreneurial class are. I suspect, and I’m guessing Ms. Penny would have more complete information, that even with the rationalisations made in the last 15 years the Incapacity Benefit infrastructure still fails to adequately recognise mental illness as a valid reason for being out of work. But it is better than it was in 1979, and better than it was in 1995. And a side-effect of that is that the number of people claiming incapacity will go up, because we started using a slightly more rational definition of ‘incapacity’.

I have no figures: but the cynic in me suspects that the numbers in this report reflect a redefinition of mental disorders as “not being that sick”.

Post scriptum; another aspect is that modern working practices are, it seems fairly clear now, causing more mental disorders than any time in the past. And most specifically, causing more of them among people who are cared about; i.e. the entrepreneurial classes. Speaking as one who has experience of call-centres; there’s a good reason the average burn-out period is 18 months continuous employment in one.

Labour stated that a lot of disabled people have hidden talents, yes we do because we have to live in a world made for the fit, but this talent is not about working but living.

I have just done a course on how to live without taking pain killers, and this women said to me, pain is only in your head, I said to her did you have any children, then said when they were born did you have pain, she said yes it was bad, was it in your head and she said of course not.

Then she thought about it and said I see what you mean, of course pain signals come from the brain but if you have a bad back the pain is in your back.

I then did a course on how to move a wheelchair in such a manner you look professional, then I did a course on how to wear a suit.

I then did qualifications in health and safety, disability and welfare, but the one thing in ten years I’ve not had was a job, out of all the people who gave me courses not one of them was disabled, when I asked they informed me because instructors have a hard job moving round from one teaching post to another it was not suitable for the disabled.

I’ve done father Christmas , I’ve done the tin can rattling for charities, I picked up litter in a car park, and I’ve done the basket handing out each was six weeks each paid the min wage.

The one thing I and the job center have failed to do is find me a real job, oh I’ve sat in an office for six weeks doing nothing, this company took on disabled as a social conscientious, but the job was fake.

So give me a real job and I’ll do it, but already the new company that has taken over has complained the government is not helping employers taking on the handicapped I had to write to them to explain handicapped in the UK is not a word to be used.

God help us all

I think you miss the central point regarding incapacity benefits. In some areas of the Country where there is a huge surplus of labour, then having a disability becomes a barrier to employment. Sure everyone sees Stephen Hawkins and applauds him for working, but that is hardly the same as expecting everyone suffering from motor neuron disease to take up bar work, isn’t it. When the entire laws of physics are discovered, no-one will expect Hawkins to take up joinery.

No one is employed to ‘flip a burger’ in this Country. That is a pretty silly idea. People may be employed to work in drive through restaurants, but they have to do lots of different tasks, for which their disability may prevent them from doing. They have to follow health and safety legislation for example, nobody want incontinent people serving food, not even McDonald’s and no employer wants someone who has ‘good days and bad days’ either.

The population in general is getting healthier and living longer , far fewer people are injured at work or disabled through industrial diseases than 20 years ago, so why would the proportion of the working aged population deemed unfit to work (meaning any work, i.e can’t even sit in a call centre or flip a burger) be *increasing* unless a proportion are in fact not really that sick. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist, a statistician, or even a welfare expert to see that.

You have a point in that newspapers who see all disabled people as spongers will be the first to cry ‘political correctness gone mad’ where employers are expected to make reasonable adjustments.

I don’t see anyone arguing that employers should take on people who do not want to work. The question is whether people who do not want to work should be entitled to benefits.

There is a difference in being unable to work (whether someone is physically or mentally incapable, or if there is simply no work available) and deciding that you would prefer other people to work on your behalf.

It’s perhaps noteworthy that “free” labour markets – in the sense of the supplier of labour having the same theoretical access to the law of contract as the consumer of it – arose in western Europe only in the wake of the labour shortage caused by the Black Death.

However I do think we should be very careful about using the word “free” in respect of labour market transactions. It’s only true of them in a very narrow, technical sense, and. as I have been trying to show, Marx’s journalistic category of “wage slavery” is surely at least as revealing.

My basic position is that there is still a lot of validity in Marx’s descriptive analysis of the moral consequences of capitalist markets on society and the quality of individual lives. His prescription, the creation of solidaristic political institutions has clearly been shown to be either mistaken or (as I would say) incomplete.

The “left” from Spartacus to the General Strike and beyond has shown a capacity for seizing power under certain circumstances but an utter inability to exercise it. This is at the heart of Marx’s failure – having understood that politics is determinant in the last instance, he failed to do more than sketch a mechanism for replacing the oppression of one small group (plutocrats) with another (Party functionaries).

At the very least, as you imply, we need a political culture that regards demutualisation as the moral equivalent of mugging. We need to repalce the hegemony of ownership with the hegemony of trusteeship. We need to replace the pursuit of pleasure (”the stuff we want” as you call it) with the pursuit of happiness (the maximisation of time well spent on activities that are ends in themselves, irrepsective of whether or not those provide marketable goods or services).

If we are to recover from the trahison des clercs of “left” thinkers of the second hafl of the 20th century – and I make no apology for returning to that hobby-horse, because there can be no political progress until its implications are accepted and worked through – progressive politics will need to address two key fundamentals:

- the exercise of power is inherently abusive. Rationalisations of its exercise, such as the theory of representative democracy, can only be mitigations at best. Words such as “free” and “liberal” must be closely examined on each appearance, as they can both undermine and uphold abusive power, according to context;

- cultural values (such as the pleasure/happiness dichotomy I mentioned earlier) will need to be explicitly examined with a view to their reconstruction. For example, let us consider a family whose youngest member has recently reached adulthood. We consider such a family to be emotionally more healthy, the more it operates as a collective, with all having an equal voice, and the less anyone in it (such as the oldest male) operates autocratically. Yet we seem reluctant to take this paradigm and apply it to wider contexts: here the “commodity fetishism” Marx noticed precludes sane, adult relationship. (Hopefully this goes some way toward addressing the very fair point you make in your last paragraph.)

Isn’t that the problem though? We all want people to work when we are paying taxes, but we don’t want long term unemployed/disabled people working next to us and earning wages! Strange that.

Robert. The problem with incapacity benefit is that it includes people like yourself who has many problems but is trying to obtain work, to those who make no effort to get better and do not want to work plus governments who want to reduce the numbers of those who are claiming unemployment benefit..

A moratorium on redundancies.
Stronger employment rights for all, including access to tribunal after 3 months.
Legislation to force employers to take on long-term unemployed/incapacity when filling any job.
The equability commission to take up cases where people are being denied jobs based on illness and disability.

There you go, some simple uncontroversial steps, which we can all support. Eh?

I wasn’t suggesting that my trio of logical statements held water, simply pointing out that yours did not either.

Obviously no employer (in their role as an employer) would want to pay for labour if he could have it for free. However, the employer is also a human being (or group of the same) who realises that if he doesn’t pay his staff and nobody else pays theirs then there will be nobody with the means to buy the products and services that his company produces. In an ideal world, he thinks it would be nice if all other companies paid their staff handsomely and he could get away with not paying them at all but, unless he owns slaves, he can’t. So he pays the least he can get away with. Of course, the human being who happens to be an employer may also be a friend of some members of the workforce and may wish to see them do well. Not necessarily, but he might.

I’m quite sure that I don’t need to run through the mechanisms of a free labour market. And I do not contend that labour market practices are not, sometimes, both coercive and unfair. Bad employers often do terrible things to their staff and even good ones do from time to time. On the other hand, just occasionally, workers do bad things to their employers (although often at an even greater cost to themselves – British Leyland being a case in point) or use their employer’s monopoly status against it (tube strikes).

Lots of generally benign relationships feature elements of coersion. And lots of very benign relationships can feature occasional lapses into behaviour that is far from benign – the collapse of a loving marriage for example can often be both vicious and acrimonious. The point is not that all such relationship must therefore be considered abusive because they can contain abuses but that those elements which give rise to abuse should be minimised.

Its about nitty gritty rather than broad condemnation of all employers. Yes, it would be lovely to see more organisations set up as workers’ co-ops with very flat heirarchies but I struggle to think of many organisations that have shown an ability to do this within a complex and capital intensive industry. Can you think of a co-operative that has built a railway? or an off-shore oil platform? I appreciate that the Co-operative bank has been pretty successful but its model has not inspired many imitators. And, given the option to remain mutual or receive £1,500 most building society members took the cash.

That being the case, the employer/employee relationship will be with us for some time. And we won’t get rid of it until someone shows us the detailed workings of a better model which is capable of delivering the stuff we want. Not that this means that the current labour market cannot be improved.

Currently, one of the elements that gives rise to abuse is the appearance of a resolution to the employer’s conundrum I articulated above, the employer wants to have his goods produced by unpaid slaves but sell them to well remunerated customers. If we lived in a single market for goods and labour, this would be impossible. But we don’t – the market for goods and services is an order of magnitude freer than the market for labour. So the employer can indeed make his products in the low wage economies of the far east and then sell them in the high wage markets of the West.

However, this puts pressure on the high wage employers who remain in the West who now ask their staff to compete on productivity with workers in the far east. Workers whose standard of living nobody in the West would accept. We may consider this unacceptable but then again, if the standard of living of employees in the west is bolstered by the low prices of the goods and services they buy from the low wage economies of Asia, then you have to ask whether the charge of abusiveness should reside only with the employers.

Ah well, in that case can I ask you – since you think fines should tied to wages – would you be happy for high earners to get considerably more in UB.

I use a wheelchair once I’ve been up for an hour as I’ve a spinal cord injury to lower back and neck. I’ve an implanted Morphine pump to stop myself having fits due to pain. I broke almost ever bone in my dam body for one reason or another, falling over mostly trying to learn to walk again.

I’ve serious problems now with my liver and kidneys, I’ve got serious heart problems after the accident. I fell at work 100ft, spending eighteen months in hospital, I’ve had 3/4 of an inch of my spine removed, I’ve got plates and screws in my legs , and I caught MRSA on three different occasions the last nearly killed me.

SO the one thing you have all missed is that with all these problems who the fuck wants to employ me.

Thats the real question when I was a Foreman for a large building firm, we never ever use the job center, because we knew they send us the dregs, the people who had been on the dole for a long long time, and who wants these people, they did not want a job and we wanted people who wanted to work.

If you have a person who wants to kill himself or has a serious problem with cutting themselves who the fuck wants to employ them.

With me it’s the smell, I’ve a serious bowel and bladder dysfunction and I piss myself and shit myself, yes perhaps I can have a job in Asda.

Out of the jobs I’ve had interviews for people have said look we simple cannot use you.

So why is it governments are not offering me a job..

That’s a bit before my time but like I say I was working in the welfare field from the early 90s and following the politics as well as being familiar with the machinary. In fact it seemed to us that government pressure was going the other way ie get people off Invalidity Benefit on to Unemployment benefit to save money.

“Frankly, most of the objections to having people previously on IB rejoin the labour market (that they aren’t capable of it, that employers won’t take them on, that they will drive down wages because they represent a larger reservoir of unemployed labour, etc) sound suspiciously like the objections made about women looking for work.”

No-one’s objecting to people with disabilities entering the jobs market. But it needs to be on their own terms with appropriate support. People should NOT be forced into a skewed jobs market just to keep wages down.

“If you have a better way of lifting people out of poverty than getting them into work, lets hear it.”

That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that people are being taken off higher incapacity based payments and dumped onto Jobseekers Allowance. If that’s your idea of ‘lifting people out of poverty’ then say so.

Of course the Daily Mail spun 180 as usual , and having criticised the fines people on benefit got as too lenient, even when it represented the majority of someone’s weekly money, they were outraged their readers where now been given a taste of the same proportions.

Within a couple of weeks the law was changed and the middle classes went back to paying fines that were a much smaller proportion of their salary than the people on benefit.