‘Not Worth the Minimum Wage?’ Unpacking the Complexities of Intellectual Disability and its Intersection with Employment Structures

Kim Dearing

doi:10.16993/sjdr.729

Abstract

As a signifier of worth and recognition, employment is presented as a route to reduce inequality. Yet, for people who have an intellectual disability (ID) and are in receipt of social care, employment policy is often a site of tension. With less than six percent of working-aged people within this demographic in any form of employment in the UK (Learning Disabilities Observatory 2016), work is offered through a marginalised context, with individuals who wish to explore work often excluded from the very programmes set up to support them. Based on ethnographic research at a job club supporting people with an ID and using a case study narrative approach, I unpack the multifaceted reality of everyday life for learning disabled people struggling to access work, its intersections with national minimum wage legislation, and how space can be crafted in response to such exclusion.

Highlights

During the UK 2019 election campaign, a party candidate was heckled at a constituency hustings for suggesting that people with an intellectual disability (ID) should be able to earn less than the national minimum wage (NMW), because, ‘they do not understand money’ and, instead of focusing on the financial gain of work, it was, ‘about them being given the opportunity to work because it’s to do with the happiness they have about working’ (Busby 2019)
Prior to this media attention, there had been limited discussion on whether the structure of the NMW dis-serves people with an ID with both MP Philip Davies and Lord Fraud previously suggesting that NMW legislation may make paid work harder to access for people who do have an ID
Fraud spoke of vulnerable people with limited ability who wanted to feel valued and have an opportunity to give back to society. These requests to increase such opportunities have come from advocates feeling the absence of the workshops of yesteryear, where opportunities were offered under the principle of promoting ‘equality of employment... open to everyone’ (Sennett 2012: 44). Such heated debates are the crux of this study, in considering how intellectually disabled people are excluded within the conceptualisation of work and how this manifests in everyday reality

Summary

Kim Dearing

As a signifier of worth and recognition, employment is presented as a route to reduce inequality. For people who have an intellectual disability (ID) and are in receipt of social care, employment policy is often a site of tension. With less than six percent of working-aged people within this demographic in any form of employment in the UK (Learning Disabilities Observatory 2016), work is offered through a marginalised context, with individuals who wish to explore work often excluded from the very programmes set up to support them. Based on ethnographic research at a job club supporting people with an ID and using a case study narrative approach, I unpack the multifaceted reality of everyday life for learning disabled people struggling to access work, its intersections with national minimum wage legislation, and how space can be crafted in response to such exclusion

Introduction

Methods

Discussion