News that more than half of England’s Remploy factories were targeted for closure sent shockwaves across Great Britain earlier this month, even as some government officials argued that it would eventually present better employment opportunities for people with disabilities.
Remploy is a British government-subsidized organization that primarily employs people with disabilities. The video portion of this BBC News report says that at its peak, Remploy had more than 10,000 workers in its manufacturing plants across the country. But, more recently, as the operation struggled to maintain financial viability, it made the decision to shut down 36 of its 54 factories, leading to the loss of jobs for more than 1,700 people with disabilities.
While workers and legislators expressed grief, disappointment, and outrage over the decision, the minister for disabled people Maria Miller offered reassurance that the British government was not turning its back on people with disabilities. She told the BBC that the £320 million budget remained intact, and that efforts would be redirected toward helping these people find work in privately owned manufacturing operations:
By spending the money more effectively, we can get thousands more disabled people in work… This is about equality and fairness for disabled people.
But Kaliya Franklin, a leading advocate for the rights of people with disabilities in England, doesn’t necessarily share Miller’s viewpoint. Her commentary for the independent political website, politics.co.uk, praises the “highly skilled employment and services” Remploy factories provide and cites their contribution to a number of assembly, packaging, and fulfillment tasks performed on behalf of British companies.
While Franklin applauds the expansion of the “Access to Work” program endorsed by Miller, she is also concerned whether mainstream society is ready for such a change, and that the debate over “what is or isn’t politically correct” shouldn’t artificially accelerate the process:
Most of us aspire to be employed based on our skills and experience, in exactly the same way any other employee is selected… That is certainly an ideal we can and should all aspire to, but it’s an ideal that will only develop gradually over decades to come and creates the danger of overtaking the current reality.
The current reality for Great Britain also includes a high unemployment rate that spurs fierce competition for the manufacturing jobs that are available. Perhaps the national scale of Remploy was becoming untenable, and a transition to the type of contract service operations offered by ATI and like-minded organizations in the United States would benefit all parties involved; especially when combined with career training opportunities for people with disabilities.
But part of Franklin’s outrage stems from this very lack of imagination when trying to resolve the Remploy problem. Another part is the lack of inclusion of the voices of those people with disabilities in the decision-making. We’ll explore these facets in tomorrow’s post.
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Image by memespring (Richard Pope), used under its Creative Commons license.
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