Delivering employment to the disabled

However, this approach has faced challenges, not only from the private sector and from government, but also from within the disability rights movement. It is felt the act of Affirmative Action will promote discriminatory stereotypes and stigmas within the workforce, which only hires people with disabilities because it is regulated to do so. But this form of discriminatory stereotypes and stigmas can be regulated against through legally enforceable political correctness. In the long run this will promote the employment of people with disabilities as a societal norm.

The pragmatic wisdom of Marta Russell concerning the employment of people with disabilities is identified in the following quote. As Russell (cited in Hershey 2000) puts it:

The free-marketer elements in the disability movement decided that all we needed was an “equal opportunity”, as opposed to affirmative action to remedy past patterns of discrimination. I think that was a huge mistake. It would definitely be revolutionary to make corporations hire us, and to prevent corporations from firing employees upon disablement. Affirmative action may be only incrementalist reform - which admittedly does not solve the question of full employment - but it has gotten some results for other minorities.

In other words, Russell identifies the concept of equal opportunity, in terms of an antidiscrimination focus, with the competitive market system. That is, a system where there is supposedly no discrimination, but where the employer may choose the employee according to individual merit. Such an approach denies the structural relations that influence what is available to individuals, and downplays the fact that merit, as a concept is a social construction. Of particular relevance to this discussion, merit as a concept in most contexts carries a biomedical assumption of being able-bodied, narrowly defined, thereby excluding all those labelled as living with a disability.

That is a disabled person’s theoretical right to an accommodation is really no right at all; it is dependent upon the employer's cost-benefit analysis. The bottom line in private business is to accumulate profits and pay the costs involved in making them. The political economic context of free market capitalism, and the promotion of the market by neo-liberal and third way policy, provides a significant obstacle to the implementation of affirmative action policies.

Another policy approach to the employment of people with disabilities to be discussed relates to the government fulfilling the role of employer of last resort.

Government as employer of last resort

In order to bring more people with disabilities into the social inclusion that employment offers it is necessary to expand the work environment beyond the capitalist profit motive and ensure the public sectors act as the employers of last resort.

The use of the government as employer of last resort is to be the cornerstone of full employment, acknowledging employment as a fundamental economic and human right. This basic idea is that the government will employ anybody with an impairment who is ready and willing to work at an appropriate wage and who has been unable to find work through the private sector.

The level of wage paid by the government as employer of last resort is a matter for social policy, as health care or other benefits are likely to be included. Such a program will be based on the consideration of a number of political and economic factors. These decisions are not fixed forever and the wage and benefits package of the Employer of Last Resort work force, will be adjusted over time.

Before the social policy making capacity of the state was constrained by neo-liberal reforms, government was the main and most appropriate instrument for such an employment policy. The government is able to create an infinitely elastic demand for labour at a minimum wage rate that does not depend on either the long or short term profit expectations of private business. Many government controlled enterprises are capable of divorcing themselves from the profit making cycle.

To give one example of this model in action, as a person with a disability in 1983, I sought employment with the Australian federal government under a scheme designed specifically for people with disabilities. At the time, this was the only major employer to whom a prospective employee with disabilities could apply without being stereotyped as non functional, or as a liability likely to reduce an employer’s profits.

I gained employment by passing an intellectual testing process that was flexible within equal opportunity guide lines. The government has since continually reformed its program as employer of people with disabilities. Recently released Australian statistics as reported by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission attest to this: