Negotiating ‘Difference’: Representing Disabled Employees in the British Workplace
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| Author | Deborah Foster,Patricia Fosh |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00748.x |
Negotiating ‘Difference’: Representing
Disabled Employees in the British
Workplacebjir_748560..582
Deborah Foster and Patricia Fosh
Abstract
Drawing on qualitative interviews with disabled employees, union officers and
disability-related organizations, this article examines employee attempts to
negotiate workplace adjustments and associated issues of workplace represen-
tation. UK employment law utilizes an individual medical model of disability,
which conflicts with traditional collective approaches favoured by trade unions,
which has implications for disabled employees and union representation. We
explore the different strategies available to unions and conclude that, despite the
role played by disability-related organizations in supporting employees, unions
are the only workplace actors who are capable of reconfiguring the ‘personal as
political’ and integrating disability concerns into wider organizational agendas.
1. Introduction
Discussions of workplace diversity have increasingly become integrated into
the mainstream industrial relations (IR) literature. They feature in debates on
union representation and renewal and in analyses of the influence of social
movements, diversity and the ‘politics of identity’ (Colgan and Ledwith 2000;
McBride 2001; Munro 2001). In the UK, these debates have been dominated
by considerations of gender and race. In comparison, the workplace interests
of disabled employees have been relatively neglected, contributing to what
Humphrey (1998: 588), in her account of disabled people in the UK trade
union movement, describes as ‘a political and cultural forgetfulness’.
Drawing on qualitative interviews with disabled employees, this article
attempts to ‘give voice’ to a group of employees whose narratives are often
absent in dominant quantitative accounts of their workplace experiences. We
examine disabled employees’ attempts to negotiate workplace adjustments
Deborah Foster is at Cardiff University. Patricia Fosh is at South Western University of Finance
and Economics.
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00748.x
48:3 September 2010 0007–1080 pp. 560–582
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
under the terms of the UK Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995.
Focusing first on individual case studies, our intention is to gain insights into
employees’ ‘lived realities’. In a second set of interviews with trade union
officials and disability-related voluntary and government organizations, we
refer to these experiences and discuss their wider implications for effective
workplace representation. Data was gathered for the purpose of a pilot study
and was, therefore, deliberately exploratory and inductive in character (Glaser
and Strauss 1967). The research belongs to a long sociological tradition,
concerned to document the experiences of under-represented groups from
their own perspective by utilizing personal narratives (Taylor et al. 2009).1
We begin our discussion by establishing some contextual and theoretical
reference points. First, we examine influences on academic, policy and work-
place approaches to disability in Britain and how these have been shaped by
the politics of the disability movement. We explore how a specific British
‘social model of disability’ has developed and its contribution to the politi-
cization and collectivization of workplace disability concerns. We then criti-
cally evaluate the character of UK disability employment law, which utilizes
a ‘medical’ rather than a ‘social’ model of disability and examine why this has
created problems for employees and workplace representatives. The role of
union and non-union organizations in the provision of workplace support
and advice to disabled employees is explored, and we ask whether unions
alone have the expertise to represent such a diverse group. Interview data
with individual employees and trade union officials is then presented and our
concluding section analyses the themes arising from these interviews with
reference to earlier contextual debates.
2. The disability movement and its influence on approaches to disability
policy and practice in the UK
Much of the literature on disability and work is broad and multi-disciplinary
in character. In Britain, ‘disability studies’ as a specialist academic field
developed during the late 1970s, largely out of debates between activists in
the early disability movement. These political origins and the dominant
position of disabled academics within the discipline have been important and,
moreover, have shaped the development of distinctive theoretical and meth-
odological approaches to research in this area (cf. Campbell and Oliver 1996;
Oliver 1996; Pagel 1988).
Contrasts are often drawn between the politics and histories of the disability
movements in Britain and the United States (Pagel 1988; Shakespeare 2006).
The absence of a broad based Civil Rights Movement in Britain, of the kind
that existed in the United States, through which disabled people could channel
their political demands, is regarded as significant by disability activists (Oliver
1996; Pagel 1988; Thomas 2007). The early British disability movement was
inward looking and internally divided. Political agendas were dominated by
single-issue campaigns such as the Disablement Income Group objective to
Representing Disabled Employees 561
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009.
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