Michelle
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
The question is not necessarily can you work but are there any actual jobs in the national economy that you can do that will produce enough money (i.e. surplus value) for capital to make it worthwhile hiring you? Tomlinson is using a lot of weaselly language (though whether deliberately or through ignorance is difficult to know). He is right that it is not an either/or issue. What illness and disability do is constrict the number of jobs you are able to work at and the amount of surplus value you can produce. And at the end of the day, if you must sell your labor (which you will need to do unless you own the means of production or are independently wealthy) you must modify your labor to meet the needs of capital not the other way around.
My brother has Down Syndrome. There are some very specific jobs that he can be trained to do and he is very fastidious and thus, does them very well. The problem is, he needs a great deal of supervision---far more than someone of average intellectual capacity. Which, of course, means whoever employs him will make less money from his labor. And so here in the US we had something known as the sheltered workshop in which employers could pay him less than minimum wage arguing that it costs more to employ him. In my state, we've banned subminimum wages. So his employer (Goodwill) fired him and other employees like him. He has a new job (though I'm unclear how it's getting around the subminimum wage law given that my sister says he might actually be paying to work in this job
) and he's so thrilled! My partner has a family member there in the UK who has been on PIP for many years now due to autism. He, too, in specific situations would be an excellent employee and would be thrilled to have such work. And work---doing something useful in your community---is something that is a core part of being human. It can provide a great deal of meaning to our lives. But how many "specific situations" are really available?! Is this just making work because "work will set you free" (i.e. a Bullshit Job) or work that is truly needed? Is this just one more way for capital to exploit an especially vulnerable population? (I think we all know the answer to this...
) Moreover, among the likely reasons so much of the adult population is on disability is because we have consolidated jobs that used to be done by three people into a job done by only one person, making that job far more demanding and requiring someone to be even fitter. Thus, more constraints on the number of jobs that can be done by people with any sort of medical impairment. If Labour really want to make work more accessible to people with disabilities (and I think we can all agree that is highly dubious), they are going to have make capital more willing to take a bit less surplus value from the labor they are demanding. And, of course, for those of us with conditions like ME or lupus or congestive heart failure, etc., who the hell is going to hire someone who is not able to be a reliable employee?! How much surplus labor could that possibly provide anyone? But hey, it'll make a tidy sum for
