Nicolette Barischoff just announced on Twitter that the deadline for pitching Personal Essays to Disabled People Destroy SF (see previous post) is tomorrow.

So if you were thinking of pitching, now's the time.

Autism Women's Network: Disability Doesn't Come With Extra Time and Energy

What's missing from the discussion is that disabled people work harder because of the fear of losing their job, and the difficulty of finding one, in the face of workplace disablism. So when people misinterpret it as some positive, that's three separate layers of disablism being compounded into one positive.

First the idea that disabled people aren't as able, which is an aspect of workplace disability discrimination (and wider social discrimination). This is grows out of the (illegal) demand we all be identical cogs in the production machine. It's based on a presumption of incompetence and defending the right of employers to that view.

Worth determined by job? An identical cog in the machine? Disabled people worth less? A refusal to challenge workplace disability discrimination?

We've misread the whole discussion.These aren't the views of concerned parents. they're the views of hardline Tories.

** I wouldn't normally make a point based on class privilege, but in this case I think it's central to the discussion - Monckton can afford for her daughter to be paid less, that's not necessarily true of families or individual disabled people in more straitened circumstances.

Beyond my part in the Spartacus Network response to the Work and Health Green Paper, I wanted to do a personal response as I take a slightly different view of the Disability Employment Gap that Work and Health is supposed to challenge and think it's much more to do with employer/recruiter disability discrimination and tacit government acceptance of the same/reluctance to display employers in a bad light.

I'd set today aside to do that, as submissions have to be in before 11:45PM (and dyspraxic, so bad with deadlines and planning), so of course today was the day I crashed and burned and slept all day because of cumulative fatigue.

The consultation had 46 questions, I managed to answer about 30 of them between waking up and remembering and 11:30PM rolling around which was when I pressed submit (just in time, it wasn't exactly quick to respond).

Which means I couldn't thoroughly respond to Work and Health because it was too much work for my health....

*headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*
 

Sigh, even the DWP admitted that Two Ticks was being abused and needed to be replaced because employers were overwhelmingly not following through on their commitments towards disabled people under the scheme. (Research showed one in five did nothing, and over half met only one of five commitments)

So it created Disability Confident as a (badly flawed) replacement

Then what does it do?

It hands Disability Confident status to every company that had Two Ticks

Utterly farcical

Article with comments by Yours Truly

At least it explains where DWP found 2400 firms to sign up to Disability Confident so quickly. 2300 of them didn't.

We (disabled people) were promised several years ago that a better replacement would be along soon.

In the meantime we've had the worse than useless Disability Confident proclaiming that employers are just embarrassed about disability.

It's now emerged, they aren't confident enough to do a proper launch, that a revamped Disability Confident is the replacement for Two Ticks and will have three tiers.

Tier 1 asks companies to make a single commitment in comparison to Two Ticks five, is self assessed, and once they've sent in the trivial paper work, they get to use the new logo.

Tier 2 asks companies to sign up to several more commitments, roughly equivalent to Two Ticks, and again it's self assessed and they get a pretty logo. The commitments basically amount to agreeing to do what is already legally required under the Equality Act 2010. (Yes, that's right, Tier 1 signs you up to do less than you're already legally required to).

I thought 'well, at least Tier 3 will better than Two Ticks'. More fool me.

Tier 3 consists of getting yourself assessed on Tier 2. You can pay to get yourself assessed, but you can also be assessed by your mate whose company is already Tier 3, or your mate who runs a Disabled People User Led Organisation, even if it has no interest whatsoever in employment. Pass this and you get to call yourself a 'Disability Confident Leader' and use the appropriate logo.

They've taken a scheme that was worthless because everyone signed up for the logo and never followed through on the commitments, and replaced it with one where you don't have to make the commitments.

The other quotes in the article are interesting, even the people who worked with DWP on producing it, including a DPULO that's stopped being a DPULO and rebranded itself into an assessment company to take advantage, are describing it as a lost opportunity. While others openly say 'if we asked companies to stop being disablist none of them would sign up'.

Talk about being seen to be doing something.
 

I finally wrote the blog on the Me Before You controversy I've been intending to write for several weeks.

'Finally' because I thought a lot about how I should do it, as the obvious approach to take as both disabled writer and disability activist collides head-on with the advice to us as baby writers to never do anything remotely controversial on the net (given agents and publishers will hunt your web-presence down as a form of due diligence). In the end I went with the obvious approach, because not taking apart how the writing and filming process systematically failed disabled people, and especially wheelchair users, seemed like a betrayal.

There's a lot of embedded links, so I'll link to it in place rather than reproduce it here: Rather You Than Me

CW for extended discussion of euthanasia and disablist fuckwittery

This one surprised me. Who is stronger on disability, Clinton or Sanders (obviously not Trump): Berned

And it's not just from one person, disability writer David Perry has confirmed similar experiences trying to get the Sanders campaign to engage with disability issues. While Sanders' suggestion that that people with chronic pain should 'treat' it with 'yoga and guided medication' is genuinely rage-making*.

Meanwhile rolling eyes at people horrified by #DisabilityTooWhite hashtag. If they had a clue about the origin of the movement they might realise there's a reason early groups such as UPIAS are commonly referred to as 'white men in wheelchairs'**! Seems like we have to educate people that interesectionality exists every time it's raised in relation to a different minority

* There's a place for relaxation techniques, I've used guided meditation myself, but they're by no means adequate on their own.

** I do see a slight irony that I'm saying this as a white man in a wheelchair!