Fran’s School of Hard Knocks

What Remploy Did For Me

When I was a beneficiary of its expertise, Remploy was still owned by the Department of Work and Pensions. Following extensive factory closures, it is now in private hands, owned by Maximus and an employee trust. Since the reorganisation, what has happened to its disabled employees? They have not just gone away, and there will be hopeful for suitable openings, as anxious as the next person that their last job will not become a distant memory.

I was in and out of work as a solicitor over a period of twelve years.  At one time – how embarrassing to admit this – so poor was my bargaining position that I desperately needed help to regularise my pay and paperwork. My well-intentioned boss was a single practitioner too busy to deal with it. Remploy agreed to accept me onto their books and was able to set my pay to rights, provide me with pay slips, sort out my national insurance contributions and offer a pension, as well as day-to-day advice and support. During periodic visits, my Remploy supervisor saw me working and asked why I didn’t find myself a proper job: funding limits meant that I was at the top of my pay bracket and likely to stay there. He obviously felt I deserved better.

Taking his words to heart, I did find another job quite easily. Because my new pay increased substantially, Remploy could not continue to support me and I bid them a fond farewell as I prepared to take my chances on the open market. But pay was only one part of their remit. They provided understanding, a position of bargaining strength and expertise, all of which I lost when we parted company.

Aware of my limitations, I took another post advertised as part-time, thirty hours a week. But as always, the devil is in the detail. To do the job, I was expected to accept unrealistic deadlines set by other people, and was forced to work after hours. The pay was great, but nothing was added for overtime, which stretched uncomfortably until I was easily putting in forty hours a week. For an able-bodied colleague that might be a nuisance. For someone with a disability, the effect is more insidious. After six months, I had to rest, but when I asked for a day off each week – planning to fit thirty hours into four days – twice my request was refused without any discussion. Exhausted and faced with targets I struggled to meet, I had to leave. These days I work from home, aware that when I put in a forty hour week, at least I can do so from the comfort of my armchair and take frequent breaks. How many employers can afford to be so relaxed?

For those of us who might wish to work independently in the job market, the truth about Remploy is that their continuing support has been vital for longer-term success, though this is not always obvious at the outset. Remploy helped me to stay in work because they understood my practical dilemma, which no other employer would take account of in the normal course of business: I needed to be able to pace myself. Remploy were able to find a formula that worked. In so doing, they enabled me to take a longer-term view. Once their support was removed, I soon found myself unable to manage in an environment unapologetically geared to an able-bodied workforce.

According to the Sayce review which recommended the closure of Remploy factories, funds available to make finding a job easier are better targeted at disabled employees directly. In the same way that disabled consumers have the right to visit shops unimpeded, employment seems increasingly to be treated as a matter of access. The disability alliance website notes that “Access to Work helps disabled people and employers with adjustments to premises, transport costs and other in-work support” all of which certainly help. But what happens once an employee with impairments has a foot in the door?

Overwhelmingly, employers consider one aspect of work: their financial costs and gains. While disability discrimination legislation has made great strides forward, there remain many aspects in which the market driven-economy can skip neatly around its obligations to disabled employees. In hidden and insidious ways, a disabled employee often remains at a disadvantage, no matter how many hours are devoted to employee relations or however many policies exist to allow flexible working. Unfavourable comparisons around productivity, punctuality, sociability, public image and teamwork remain.

A friend of mine who is disabled and writes plays about disability wrote to me, “(we) should be judged according to others in your circumstances”. But how many disabled people can keep their place securely in mainstream employment? It is a difficult conundrum. In the Remploy factories, impairment has always been the norm, which was at least useful when it came to making meaningful comparisons.

So long as each former employee of a Remploy factory has found work and access to the same levels of continuing support, the changes in workplace structure and ethos may not impact too badly. But somehow, I doubt that the necessary levels of support will remain available over the long term.

Remploy has efficiently and quietly gone about its business over many years. If it had been making a lot of noise and grabbing the headlines, its contribution to the lives of disabled adults might not have been so easily refashioned to suit an ideology which assumes, on scant evidence, that for a disabled person the difficulties of finding and keeping a job are easily sorted with a bit of remodelling. The architects of the changes will not be waiting around to pick up the pieces if their optimism turns out to be misplaced.  Yet, as news reports of the time indicate, barely one third of the employees made redundant during the privatisation processes have found re-employment. Old-style supported employment has its place in the scheme of things, after all.

I hear that Labour are planning to re-nationalise. Will they re-nationalise Remploy?

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They call me disabled

I object to being called a ‘disabled’ person, or even an impaired one.

Admittedly, the social model of disability marks a distinct improvement on the whole debate. The social model maintains that we are not disabled, it is the system that is disabled in that it fails to accommodate us. Yet, the social model still preserves the concept of disability and some of its terminology, which then allows others who have no interest in the niceties of theory to keep using these terms of reference for their own ends.

After years of optimism, the words and theories still delineate classes of person who fall outside some categories and into others. Being classified, even in passing as ‘disabled’ or ‘impaired’ gives the impression, intentional or not, that people with disabilities are a race apart.

The truth is far more subtle. We are all disabled, in which case, why make any distinction? It is no badge of honour to me that I have been defined in so many aspects by what I cannot do. Political and social adherence to impossibility is frustrating; emotional entrapment by a peculiarised self-image is a recipe for life-long depression and self-hatred.

Each of us, whatever we are capable of, is entitled to define ourselves as we see fit. For the rest, we are what we do. Beyond that lies a sea of irrelevance.

It was my father who first made clear to me, how insidious are casual references to prejudice. “Why do we refer to them as ‘black youths, Fran? In the news reports, we never say, ‘White youths….’” That was in the seventies. How much have things changed?

I grow a conviction that many aspects of identity – generational difference, gender, size, ethnicity – are ascribed by others, and used continually, to make themselves feel comfortable.

Everyone, no matter who they are, deserves to be treated with respect, and to have offered to them the individual consideration that allows them to live a full life. Why then, would I choose to define myself as ‘disabled and proud’? How can I ‘self-identify’ as disabled? I do not, nor ever have, believed myself to be ‘disabled’, but to have been given those characteristics and abilities that will inform my journey in this life, and help me to learn the soul lessons that I came here to learn.

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I was invited to a conference on supporting adults with impairments in the workplace. Yes, it was really good. I enjoyed meeting people and comparing notes. And I’m very grateful to the organiser for inviting me along to an event on a subject which is close to my heart, even though my contributions tended to reflect my personal experiences rather than comment directly on the nuts and bolts of policy, strategy, and the many schemes which exist to help adults with impairments make a smooth transition into mainstream employment.

As anyone who has read my book will know, I was unable to maintain the transition to full-scale mainstreaming after support which I had previously had from Remploy was withdrawn because, to put it baldly, I was going to be earning too much. After almost eighteen months, I quit from my last professional post, suffering from profound depression and anxious about my future.

My presentation at this event did not go as I had hoped it might: though it is always hard to gauge the value of our own contributions, I did not do well, which I regret. Because of appalling conditions on the road and lack of parking, I was very late to arrive at the venue, and because I did not stick to script, my presentation lacked cogency.  But the organiser had very kind things to offer about what I did say, and I am grateful.

The dust is beginning to settle, and through all the papers and power-point presentations, one remark offered early on really sticks in my mind. Asked about reasonable adjustments and the challenges of hiring adults with impairments, our speaker spoke and then added something like, ‘And we might have to consider whether employing anyone with impairments might in fact, put other colleagues at risk.’

Is it just me, or is that statement appalling? I wish – oh, how I wish – I had stood up and challenged it openly at the time. But I was newly arrived and didn’t want to shoot my bolt too soon. I wish I had challenged the speaker to explain themselves. For it seems to me to be an appallingly prejudiced assumption to make, that employees with impairments are likely to put their (able-bodied) colleagues at risk. I beg your pardon?

If any employer even suspected that, I certainly would not want to work for them. It seems like the kind of half-baked reasoning that used to be touted as sufficient excuse in the seventies and eighties: ‘You can’t come on my boat in case your drown’ – ‘you can’t come into the cinema in case there is a fire….’ I thought we were getting past that.

I used to be reasonably optimistic that political and work place progress towards inclusion was inevitable. Perhaps, since in the public sphere things have indeed moved on, one day the SMEs will catch up and we will see full-scale employment and ‘mainstreaming’ as standard. But if this is the type of comment we are still hearing from well-respected professionals in the field, perhaps I have good reason to be pessimistic. I hope I’m wrong.

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At risk of being misunderstood

We are all at risk of being misunderstood.  Even two people, who have lived together for decades can find themselves at odds.  She, perhaps because she needs two comforting arms around her just when he turns his back and goes away to be by himself; he, because he was only giving her some space that she was so obviously crying out for…And when he is upset, he likes to be alone.  Misunderstandings can so easily proliferate, like pins and needles after sitting too long with our legs tucked under us.

It is trite to say that we write memoir because we feel misunderstood.  And I have said that I wrote Trapped because I felt misunderstood.  But in fact, I simply didn’t understand anything.  That despair, nestled at the root of utter incomprehension, turned me initially guarded, then defensive, then prickly, then isolated.

In retrospect, and having had the courage to spell out as much as I could for myself and the reader, I feel that much misunderstanding and sorrow might have been avoided, or shed more easily, if there had been more people around who were unafraid to grasp me in their arms, speak to me as I needed to be spoken to, firmly and kindly, in order to break through the self-imposed isolation that becomes one consequence of being misread.

I find I am still grieving for the obvious reason that life was awful, and for the less obvious reason that I have wasted so many years being unhappy.  There is another, more insidious pain of knowing that my perceptions – like those of others! – were often greatly mistaken, and that if I had been less fearful and stood my ground, no-one would have minded terribly.

Sure, the world is full of insensitive oafs, and cruel people who are casually unjust, and it is our focus on such people that turns us inward.  But as I have since learned and continue to discover, the world is also brimming with delightfully kind, forgiving and thoughtful people.

I have missed so many opportunities for joy, and for love, fun, humour and sheer delight.  Meeting wonderful people, knowing they can see past my social awkwardness, my stumblingly stupid statements, to the smile that hopes it will be accepted, is so liberating.  I am sorry for all the wasted opportunities to show kindness and caring.  Life is full of inexplicable contradictions, isn’t it?

Without having gone out of my way to excavate my experiences by writing them, none of this would be clear.  Muddy confusion would all be sitting still, at the bottom of a dark glass, festering muddily.

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Memoir motivations revisited.

Why to memoirists write?

There is something in the way in which we approach the subject of our lives, perhaps viewed sceptically and a tad fearfully, like a huge pile of dishes – needing a good scrub, perhaps, or newly washed and waiting to be stacked in the cupboards. I approached Trapped  cautiously, and I suspect all memoirists tiptoe, gradually getting closer, until we are able to plunge in and immerse ourselves in the subject for a while. Life as a cold shower, perhaps.

It is a coming to terms, a reappraisal which, after all the angles have been explored, allows us to draw away again, review matters more objectively, or at least, from a different angle. For, no matter how we go about it, writing memoir forces us, at the end of a long and often painful process, to see life differently. In fact, in drawing away, we cannot but have shifted our view, even if by a minute fraction.

So, one main reason for writing memoir, is to allow us to see things differently, in the end, and to acquire fresh awareness of the struggle and heartache of others, and of our parts in the struggles of others. The good, the bad and the ugly.

Ironic, really, that readers of other genres, standard fiction and standard factual books, sometimes say that memoirists are rather self-involved. Yes, but that is part of a process of release that allows us not to be. Ironic, that in apparently being self-obsessed – why else would we imagine that others would be interested in reading about our lives? – we acquire deeper empathy for others.

I got to forty, and thought, hey, I’ve arrived, and getting old seems to be the world’s best kept secret.  I became even more sedate and withdrawn, dignified, as a forty-year-old thinks she has to be.  But as I cranked up some steam into the following decade, I knew I was hiding, and that my personal silence was much less important than finally – finally – letting my family discover who I was, and  that I really, really love them.  My family have their own issues and challenges, and my husband and daughter could do with a few more clues about me.  I thought it might be helpful if I could maybe throw some love and understanding their way: come to terms, discard those grudges that go back years, empty out the pot of resentment and clear away the backlog of mistaken assumptions.

Writing helps with all these aspects of growing up.  The process of learning to write and having the courage to publish is in itself so rewarding, that even if I knew then, what I know now that a bit of discomfort is never a reason to shy away from home truths.

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