RNIB Employment Strategy Overview
by Fred REID
Chair, RNIB Education and Employment Committee
24 April 2003
JUB creation and job finding for blind and partially sighted people in the United Kingdom : three presentations on a new approach by RNIB
The
RNIB report, Work Matters (2001) sheds new light on the exclusion of blind and partially sighted people from the Labour market in the United Kingdom. Statistics are as always approximate, but broadly indicative. There are some 90,000 registered blind and partially sighted people of working age. Of these, only about 22,000 are in employment. Their numbers have increased little in the last thirty years. There seems at first sight to have been something like a doubling since the 197so, but this is mainly due to counting groups who were formerly "invisible", eg unregistered partially sighted. A similar practice accounts for the disparity between
Work Matters and the UK
Labour Force Survey. The latter suggests a rate of economic activity of over 40 percent, but this is arrived at by including anyone who reports sight loss that causes them difficulty at work.
So the conclusion must be that there has been little real improvement in the employment of blind and partially sighted people over the last 3 decades of the twentieth century, at a time when many factors might have been thought to be promoting it, such as new information technologies, inclusive education, and a series of labour activation programmes ranging from "Access to Work" to "New Deal for Disabled People".
A full explanation of the situation would be complex.
Work Matters emphasises one fundamental point: statutory and voluntary employment services focus on blind and partially sighted people who are "close to the labour market". Rehabilitation, mentoring, job coaching, assessment of need for support on the job, are all aimed at the blind or partially sighted person who can be made "job ready" in a reasonably short time. In other words, labour activation policy in the
UK operates with a paradigm of the disabled person as
homo oeconomicus, a self-motivated, reward-seeking individual who is capable of being constructed into a competent "job seeker" in the labour market. Policy operates, therefore, on the supply side of the labour market. It is the unemployed disabled person who must be reformed, not the labour market itself.
There are undoubtedly people like that among the blind and partially sighted population of working age and, as suggested above, they have benefited from the socio-economic and technological advances of the late twentith century. But these constitute a minority. The paradigm of
homo Oeconomicus, does not fit the majority of people who report sight loss as a disability, far less the large number of registered blind and partially sighted people who are not working and who have largely despaired of working.
Work Matters identified the following groups who are, in this sense, so "distant from the labour market" that they have very little chance of finding work in the open labour market as presently constituted.
(a) people over 40 years of age (about 45,000);
(b) people with learning difficulties and-er additional impairments (no known estimates);
(c) school leavers with low educational qualifications or little work experience (about 1,000 per annum);
(d) people who resign their employment at onset of serious sight loss (about 1,000 per annum).
For a few of the above, mostly in categories (c) and (d) "supply side" solutions may be appropriate. Something might be done, for exapple, to improve retention rates in category (d). Work experience for school leavers and students would undoutedly help. Yet, given the numbers disclosed, it is obvious that any major increase in the rate of labour activity will have to come from the groups (a) and (b).
Similar conditions broadly speaking, pertain throughout Europe and operate to exclude many categories of disabled people besides blind and partially sighted. It seems clear that labour activation programmes, whether those run by voluntary organisations or by governments, are reaching only a "disabled elite", including blind and partially sighted people, who are least handicapped and easiest to accommodate in the labour market.
What is to be done ?
Work Matters makes many recommendations, but these presentations focus on two, which are the subject of ongoing study and development by RNIB:
(a) the creation of jobs by promoting social enterprise and an employment continuum in the intermediate labour market;
(b) the refocusing of employment services run by RNIB itself, with a view to managing job finding and job creation, rather than merely intervening in the statutory services.
These are the topics considered in the next two presentations.
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