One of the more provocative excerpts from Kaliya Franklin’s commentary, “Remploy, disabled workers and political correctness,” published earlier this month on the independent political website, politics.co.uk, concerned media coverage of the story that more than 1,700 people with disabilities would be losing their contract manufacturing jobs. After a blow-by-blow account of the BBCNews24 broadcast rife with British witticisms, she closes the paragraph on a serious note:
Twenty-seven minutes of people predominantly without disabilities discussing what they feel is best for people with disabilities and not even noticing the irony. We’ve seen this before in the world, it was just called something different when the people deemed to lack the intelligence or ability to have full equality and autonomy over their own lives happened to have black skin instead of disabilities.
As we noted in our coverage yesterday, Franklin is one of Great Britain’s leading advocates for the civil rights of people with disabilities and fully believes in the sentiment behind the government’s plan to transition these laborers skilled in assembly, fulfillment, packaging, and other manufacturing duties into the private sector. The stated motivations for the actions don’t pass the smell test, however, and Franklin openly wonders just how ready and accepting mainstream society will be of people with disabilities; especially if their voices aren’t part of the decision-making process that impacts their livelihood.
Fortunately, comment sections on blogs let everyone have a voice, and there was some robust back-and-forth in response to Franklin’s column. One poster, identified as Lorna Young, a person with a disability working as a contracts officer for the Manchester City Council, was disappointed in the lack of balance in Franklin’s article. From her firsthand experience, even people with the severest of disabilities can integrate into any workplace with positive results when the right support is provided.
A poster called Les Montgomery responds to Young. Montgomery says he has worked in a Remploy factory for 28 years, and a discussion of the types of work environments best suited for people with disabilities is immaterial next to the loss of that individual’s choices about where they work and their privacy, writing:
You would be and rightly so extremely offended if someone advocated taking all disabled public sector employees out of their jobs and telling them to work in Remploy. You are advocating the same thing in reverse closing Remploy and forcing [individuals] some of whom have complex needs and support [issues] to work in so-called mainstream employment… I reserve the right as a human being and as an adult to choose what sort of lifestyle I have that is [compatible] with keeping my conditions under control and keeping myself healthy.
Another poster, Lisa Maria Idge, relates a story about a man she knows who was a lifelong Remploy worker and was hoping his son would get to work there as well “because it was the only place… he would get a fair go and a chance to get real skills.” Perhaps organizations like American Training, which provides career training to people with disabilities as well as contract labor services, do not exist in England. If they did, maybe Franklin and the people with disabilities she advocates for wouldn’t have so many questions go unanswered.
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Image by tomislav medak, used under its Creative Commons license.