Employment Equality - Disability - 2019

From research carried out in 2015, it was clear that this part of the public sector was struggling to evidence much that could be described as positive in delivering employment equality across all the protected characteristics. Five years later, it was decided to check what had been made to happen since then.

In 2020, the Mainstreaming Equality reports published by these public bodies offer varying promises of a ‘jam’ that purports to be the elimination of discrimination in employment, with that ‘jam’ always scheduled to arrive tomorrow. The tomorrows promised seem never to arrive in the todays being lived now by disabled people looking for equality of opportunity in getting access to work. When the nature of the ‘jam’ is examined closely, it is in fact often found to be the thinnest of syrups, with many of the planned Outcomes on equality taking the form of improving systems for gathering data. This seems to be the 21^st century equivalent in Scotland’s public sector’s grappling with the delivery of equality, to the medieval scholasticism of such as Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theologica grappling with questions such as ‘can several angels be in the same place’.

This research, carried out in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, finds that the 5 years which have slipped past since previous research in 2015 have been stuffed so full of lost opportunities to deliver employment equality for disabled people as to produce an obscenely rich foie gras of discrimination and which requires any independent observer to apply a deep and unappetisingly ableist layer on the public sector’s usual thin dry toast of excuses for doing nothing.