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Disability Confident, or not
Jun. 30th, 2015 09:24 pm Disability Confident is a government initiative to tackle the 2m person disability employment gap, by explaining how employers are just embarrassed about disability. Yeah, right, not exactly taking the bull by the horns, is it? I've been dissecting it pretty much since it started 2 years ago, demonstrating how it refuses to actually acknowledge workplace disability discrimination, and how its own attitudes are problematic for disabled people - it thinks having a disability is a 'problem' that means employers need a 'business case' to consider hiring you - the fact it's illegal to consider disability in an employment decision is never mentioned.
Anyway, they had a big event in Swansea today, declaring it the UK's first Disability Confident city - not that it's actually done anything to deserve it, of course, but maybe someone felt it would be a nice distraction from the closure of the Independent Living Fund. It was so important for government disability policy that the Minister for Disabled People sent a video and the local MP sent a councillor to speak for him....
So as usual I live tweeted my reaction to tweets being posted by people at the event in Swansea - and got about 5 times the volume of retweets as all the actual attendees combined! It was actually even worse than these events usually are for people tweeting how 'inspiring' we are, with a special award going to the woman who doesn't like us calling ourselves 'disabled people' and wanted to start another debate on what we call ourselves and see if we gave the right answer this time.... I'm really not sure she understood the problem with what she was saying, even though she was fully aware what the Social Model is and why we choose to use 'disabled people' as our label of choice.
I'd added some new tweets to my repertoire, noting that we'd call 2m gay people denied work homophobia, 2m BME people denied work racism, 2m Muslim people denied work Islamophobia, but Disability Confident wants us to say 2m disabled people denied work is just a little employer embarrassment, (I backed off a little on 2m women denied work as I realised at the last moment I don't know how bad the female employment gap actually is and we may call it situation normal) Despite that I've still yet to see anyone come out of a Disability Confident event actually tweeting about how disability discrimination in the workplace must be stopped.
One slight change for the better is that I did get a couple of female attendees (one of them Ms You-Must-Call-Yourselves-PWDs) to engage with me on what the problem with Disability Confident is, which is only the second time in 2 years. OTOH, two gentlemen tweeting about how inspiring we all are disputed they had actually said that when pointed at Stella Young's I'm not here for your Inspiration, thank you. 'I was talking about the speaker's self-confidence. I find that inspiring' - dude, you tweeted 'Inspiring Stories!'!?!
Anyway, they had a big event in Swansea today, declaring it the UK's first Disability Confident city - not that it's actually done anything to deserve it, of course, but maybe someone felt it would be a nice distraction from the closure of the Independent Living Fund. It was so important for government disability policy that the Minister for Disabled People sent a video and the local MP sent a councillor to speak for him....
So as usual I live tweeted my reaction to tweets being posted by people at the event in Swansea - and got about 5 times the volume of retweets as all the actual attendees combined! It was actually even worse than these events usually are for people tweeting how 'inspiring' we are, with a special award going to the woman who doesn't like us calling ourselves 'disabled people' and wanted to start another debate on what we call ourselves and see if we gave the right answer this time.... I'm really not sure she understood the problem with what she was saying, even though she was fully aware what the Social Model is and why we choose to use 'disabled people' as our label of choice.
I'd added some new tweets to my repertoire, noting that we'd call 2m gay people denied work homophobia, 2m BME people denied work racism, 2m Muslim people denied work Islamophobia, but Disability Confident wants us to say 2m disabled people denied work is just a little employer embarrassment, (I backed off a little on 2m women denied work as I realised at the last moment I don't know how bad the female employment gap actually is and we may call it situation normal) Despite that I've still yet to see anyone come out of a Disability Confident event actually tweeting about how disability discrimination in the workplace must be stopped.
One slight change for the better is that I did get a couple of female attendees (one of them Ms You-Must-Call-Yourselves-PWDs) to engage with me on what the problem with Disability Confident is, which is only the second time in 2 years. OTOH, two gentlemen tweeting about how inspiring we all are disputed they had actually said that when pointed at Stella Young's I'm not here for your Inspiration, thank you. 'I was talking about the speaker's self-confidence. I find that inspiring' - dude, you tweeted 'Inspiring Stories!'!?!
