Disability rights

Keep the guard on the train!

The guard is there for everyone’s protection; recent incidents can only remind us of this. Access to rail services for disabled passengers relies on an adequate number of well-trained staff and accessible facilities. Environmental barriers, service provider policies and attitudes lead to our isolation and exclusion from work, education, volunteering and involvement in our communities. Guards have months of training and 35 different safety-crucial competencies. Yet the government is encouraging the extension of Driver Only Operation (DOO), and in many cases guards will be replaced by less...

Marxism and autism (article and video)

Can Marxism can help us to understand autistic experience in modern capitalism? How might Marxism inform our struggles for equality and liberation? There are different approaches to understanding autism. Perhaps the dominant approach is a medical one: seeing autism as a disease or tragedy, and autistic people as being broken and needing fixing. Over recent years, a more progressive approach has developed. It stresses acceptance of autistic people rather than simply “awareness”, and demands rights, equality and support rather than abusive “treatments”. This approach is based on the concept of...

Government attack PiP ruling

The government wants to reverse the effects of a court ruling which expands the number of people who can claim Personal Independence Payments (PiP). PiP is a non-means tested benefit, meant to provide extra money to people living with serious illnesses, disability or a mental health condition. A recent tribunal ruling had said that claimants with psychological problems who cannot travel without help must be treated like those who are blind. Announcing the government’s plan, No. 10 aide George Freeman said benefits should go to the “really disabled people”. Clearly Freeman doesn’t know what PiP...

Equality for autistic and neuro-divergent people!

Socialist activists are drafting a manifesto for the Labour Party of radical policies to advance equality for autistic and other neurodivergent people (those with an atypical “brain-wiring”, usually a condition such as dyspraxia or attention deficit disorder). Supported by John McDonnell, a steering group has drafted a proposed manifesto and, having launched it at Labour Party conference in September, is now inviting input from Labour Party and trade union bodies and interested individuals. The manifesto is based on five political pillars: • The social model of disability: identifying and...

For a world where diversity is normal

Val Graham reviews Autism Equality in the Workplace by Janine Booth. Janine Booth, poet and author of Autism Equality in the Workplace, is both a worker and trade union activist. A member of the TUC Disabled Workers Committee, her handbook Autism in the Workplace was published online by the TUC in 2014. Her radical approach to removing barriers and challenging discrimination against autistic people is developed in this book which is both practical and visionary. It needs to be. Despite the positive changes in education, including access to work experience, only a small minority (15%) of...

TUC Disabled Workers' Conference: planning the fightback

Nearly 200 delegates from dozens of trade unions gathered in London on 19 and 20 May to discuss issues affecting disabled workers and plan the fightback against discrimination and austerity cuts. TUC Disabled Workers’ Conference debated and agreed over twenty policy resolutions, on subjects including the disability pay gap, disability hate crime, and disabled people in the arts. A resolution highlighting suicides linked to Work Capability Assessments provided a platform for delegates’ anger and determination, and was selected to go forward to TUC Congress in the Autumn. Pretty much all...

Removing barriers for autistic workers

Cathy Nugent reviews Autism Equality in the Workplace: Removing barriers and challenging discrimination by Janine Booth. Available to buy online here . This is not a book of advice for autistic people on how to adapt to work or how to socialise with colleagues. There are other books and resource that do that. This is a book, based on many interviews with people with autism, as well as the author’s own experiences, which says employers should remove barriers that autistic people face at work. As Janine argues, “if we wait for employers to make their workplaces autism friendly voluntarily we...

The attacks on disabled people are not over

The government may have backed down over cuts to Personal Independence Payments [PIP, non-means tested benefit], but the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Stephen Crabb, has already said more cuts are in the pipeline. There are now attacks on the rights and living conditions of disabled people from almost every direction: • The cuts in benefit for new claimants on Employment Support Allowance (ESA), who are in the work-related activity group (WRAG) will be going ahead. This will be a £30 a week cut. From April 2017 nearly 500,000 will be hit by the ESA-WRAG cut. People who are...

Tory fall-out shows we can beat cuts

On 18 March Iain Duncan Smith resigned as Work and Pensions minister — in protest, so he claimed, at a planned £4.4 billion cut to disability benefits. The cut had been announced in the Budget on 16 March. The Tories had already been forced to put it on hold before Duncan Smith’s resignation, but, he claimed, chancellor George Osborne still insisted that £4.4 billion must be cut from the benefits budget somehow. Whatever Duncan Smith’s motives — it looks like he resigned primarily to campaign along with other Tory right-wingers for EU exit free from Cabinet constraints — the resignation makes...

IDS resignation shows we can beat cuts

Disabled People Against the Cuts has posted the following after Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory minister for Work and Pensions, resigned on 18 March 2016, on his own account in protest against the 16 March Tory Budget's cuts to disabled people's benefits. It's been an amazing week – culminating in the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith Whatever he resigned for – and we don’t believe a word that he says about standing up for disabled people – the fact remains – he is gone. What happens with the new Minister Crabb, we have yet to discover, but what we do know is: The fight is not over – DPAC will...

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