Welfare Reform Minister Lord Freud - said !

Richie-from-the-Boro

disabled people are "not worth" the full minimum wage

"In response to a question at Conservative party conference Lord Freud, the Welfare Reform Minister, said this: 'You make a really good point about the disabled. There is a group where, actually, as you say, they are not worth the full wage'."

He didn't just say disabled people weren't worth the minimum wage, he went further and he said he was looking at whether there is something we can do, if someone wants to work for £2 an hour.

- here .............................. and the actual audio file is here

Indie_Kid

I think I've heard this before?

And who would "want" to work for £2 an hour?

rosie51

Shame on him.
I would think most disabled people could do a better job then him, at a fraction of the cost. I am going to email him and tell what i think.

Richie-from-the-Boro

From 18 months ago ..................... here. It also reminds me of the ' Jojo the Tightfisted ' comment in 2010, reference to IDS

rogerblack

There is a grain of truth in this.
_I_ want to work for 2 pounds an hour.

ESA and WTC both assume that I must be able to do work amounting to the minimum wage.

That is - WTC has an explicit assumption that you will be assessed as if you were doing at most income / minimum wage hours.
ESA has the similar problem with the limit at 16 hours for permitted work higher level.

It is simply not legal for me - even as a self employed person to work >16 hours on ESA - even though I may be so inefficient that my earnings are under the NMW.

(I would of course _hope_ to make significantly more than 2 pounds an hour eventually - but due to my disability, there may be an extended period over which I do not - or I may never be able to do this.)

Recast 'not worth the minimum wage' to 'Unlikely to be able to be employed at the minimum wage, even with the required adjustments made by the employer'.

This hits in slightly different ways for universal credit - where in order to be removed from work-seeking requirements you need to earn 35*NMW (usually).

I note that Freud - along with a select group of others is in a club of people who if I saw them on fire, my first reaction would be to get the marshmallows and sparklers.

nightsong

He should resign, at once. Failing that, Cameron should sack him. Today.

Those comments are absolutely unacceptable and will damage the Tories at the next election - not that I care, but if they have a shred of common sense, he's history.

If he stays then the government's attitude towards the disabled is exposed for all to see - disabled people are second-class citizens to the Tories. Which is certainly my opinion of their underlying beliefs, based on my experience, but I wouldn't have thought they'd want to make it quite so blatantly obvious.

nightsong

rogerblack wrote: »

There is a grain of truth in this.
_I_ want to work for 2 pounds an hour.

ESA and WTC both assume that I must be able to do work amounting to the minimum wage.

That is - WTC has an explicit assumption that you will be assessed as if you were doing at most income / minimum wage hours.
ESA has the similar problem with the limit at 16 hours for permitted work higher level.

It is simply not legal for me - even as a self employed person to work >16 hours on ESA - even though I may be so inefficient that my earnings are under the NMW.

(I would of course _hope_ to make significantly more than 2 pounds an hour eventually - but due to my disability, there may be an extended period over which I do not - or I may never be able to do this.)

Recast 'not worth the minimum wage' to 'Unlikely to be able to be employed at the minimum wage, even with the required adjustments made by the employer'.

This hits in slightly different ways for universal credit - where in order to be removed from work-seeking requirements you need to earn 35*NMW (usually).

Out of interest, how would you live on £2 per hour? Of course this is a rhetorical question - you couldn't. The whole point of the minimum wage is to provide something like a living wage and avoid people being exploited. (I know it isn't really a living wage but it's much better than nothing).

I understand that you'd like to be doing more, but I think people working for extremely low wages causes more problems than it solves. For every person like yourself who can, in fact, afford to work for £2 per hour because they are being supported in other ways (e.g. through ESA) there will many others who are being exploited by unscrupulous employers and do NOT have a safety-net to fall back on.

And if you introduce some kind of test to see if people are disabled enough to qualify for the very low wage work, then you are reintroducing apartheid against the disabled, seeing disabled people as fundamentally different from "normal" people, which is simply abhorrent. But that's what David Fraud wants, it seems (oops sorry, Freudian slip there). I'm sure he wasn't quoting the Nazis previously by accident.

rogerblack

nightsong wrote: »

And if you introduce some kind of test to see if people are disabled enough to qualify for the very low wage work, then you are reintroducing apartheid against the disabled, seeing disabled people as fundamentally different from "normal" people, which is simply abhorrent. But that's what David Fraud wants, it seems (oops sorry, Freudian slip there). I'm sure he wasn't quoting the Nazis previously by accident.

I _AM_ different fundamentally from a normal person.
Legally, in that I could be sacked from essentially every job I could get - simply because I cannot - even with reasonable adjustments - perform it.

The assumption in the regulations that there is no diminished earning power for the disabled has pernicious problems that mean that the rules are in effect much harsher for this group trying to start their own businesses that they hope will support them.

nightsong

rogerblack wrote: »

I _AM_ different fundamentally from a normal person.
Legally, in that I could be sacked from essentially every job I could get - simply because I cannot - even with reasonable adjustments - perform it.

The assumption in the regulations that there is no diminished earning power for the disabled has pernicious problems that mean that the rules are in effect much harsher for this group trying to start their own businesses that they hope will support them.

I do apologise if what I said offended you in any way, that wasn't my intention.

SailorSam

I don't know but did this actually happen when we had Remploy ? Were the people who worked there paid a lower rate than others in the same industry but then subsidised by the state.

Richie-from-the-Boro

Although many would argue that most politicians are not worth the minimum wage, I would argue that no human being, even a politician is worth less than any other waged worker. The Freud suggestion that the disabled should work for less because they are a lower class of people is medieval and despicable. This childishly embarrassing spectacle affects the lives of so many people, watching government lawmakers dribble such nonsense reminds us all how inefficient the democratic system can be in the wrong hands. Our UK government should be protecting all its citizens and their individual rights, all humans including the disabled and politicians want and deserve the same trilogy of respect, equality and parity with everyone else on this planet,

George Bernard Shaw famously said, democracy is a "device that ensures we shall be governed by no better than we deserve". - he got that right - didn't he ?