Where Does The Campaign Go Now?
With the knowledge that 179 people are engaged in ' therapeutic work ' within the Surrey & Borders NHS Trust's various employment and training schemes without any contracts or pay scales in place and official confirmation that the Trust is not prepared to share information or debate with service users on this issue we perhaps need to be taking stock of what we have achieved so far and what we havent achieved and think about where we need to go from here if we are to campaign more effectively.
Do we continue solely focussing on the garden centre workers? , who clearly were treated in the most appalling way here or do we widen the campaign to include the other Surrey & Borders employment and training schemes and activities where no one really has a clue what is going on as there are no mechanisms for appropriate scrutiny and monitoring and Surrey and Borders arent about to say.
Jill has flagged up that the issue of workplace rights for people with disabilities is a national problem , and she did so on the basis of an official DoH and DWP report that also said wage discrimination was particularly bad within the public and voluntary sectors. With the UN currently drafting a convention on disability rights and freedoms , planned to be the first new treaty of the 21st century , this issue clearly has an international dimension as well.
There is also an often forgotten treatment and care aspect , it is one thing to support disabled people's right to employment and training, that's a positive step , quite another for those providing treatment and care to simply target people with disabilities to get them off benefits and into work irrespective of whether they can cope with this or the necessary support network is in place.
It's a complex issue and one public bodies and charities, recently slammed for exploiting disabled people in workplace and training environments, should not be allowed to consider a solution for on their own. The Surrey and Borders Trust was allowed to do this during its recent review of all of its work services and cutting payments to rather than improving the lot of its disabled workers was the result.
How do you support people by taking money away from them and making them work for nothing?
There is also a question about how we can influence without getting overly involved and becoming part of the problem and this dilemma came home with force when reading the minutes from a recent Surrey PPI Forum meeting where items on payments to service users and carers and their not being including in the decision making process were clearly ongoing issues without solution in sight and yet there on the same minutes was a crisp and decisive note confirming that £400 more was being made available to the PPI forum for expenses.....
Please post your comments and suggestions on way forward for this campaign.
posted by simply human @ 10:39 am
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Its a hard one as the problem is national as Jill said, but I think if we hang in here we may just get somewhere with SABP, No we wont make tem give the garden centre workers their £3 back, but there are lots of things we can do which are damageing for the trust, putting in compliants ect, try and get some press coverage. Maybe on day the will admit they have been bullshitting us all??
I am still waiting for my FOIA requests to be answered. One of my questions concerned whether the Priority enterprises were making a profit? They are run as commercial organisations and I believe some of them undertake factory production line commercial contracts. In my opinion we need to know more about how they are run and what kind of subsidies are being paid to enable them to keep going? We also need to have a clear definition of what constitutes work as opposed to 'training' and 'therapeutic work'. I believe they are using a loophole in the minimum wage act where they say for example that work on a production line isn't work if the disabled workers are allowed to switch off the production line any time they want. But of course the bosses who are wanting to fulfil their commercial contracts will do everything they can to stop the production lines being turned off. This kind of loophole in the law is wrong and the workers should be paid at least minimum wage rates for every hour they work regardless of whether they work a full day or not. (another loophole is if they have no obligation to turn up for the work or not and the bosses at SABT are saying they don't have to turn up but on a website about the garden centre which I have bookmarked they say 'We expect the workers/trainees to do a full day unless they have good reason.')
I think SABT may have to go further than gving back the £3 a day and start paying minimum wage rates to priority enterprises disabled workers. I think SABT must at least start acknowleging that this whole issue is riddled with discrimination and injustice for the disabled workers and start debating in an open way about what needs to be done to resolve the problems. I also think we must have our visit to the garden centre soon and interview as many of the workers as possible as well as investigating the other priority enterprises. There are still plenty of avenues for our protest to go down and given the fact you say SABT are listening into this blog perhaps we had better make our arrangments to protest further via private emails?
Agree with both of you as we do need to testcase this exploitation and the SABP Trust is , intentionally or otherwise, clearly a very bad employer of people with disabilities that thinks the numbers involved justify what it is doing .
The local focus also helps for developing and growing the campaign and finding our feet. I'm just aware that this workplace exploitation is also a national issue ......
There are secondary local issues too as SABP has established a pattern of responding very provocatively to FOIA requests , deliberately stringing them out or using perverse excuses for not addressing them at all.
I know a couple of people are taking this up with Fiona Edwards.
SABP are vunerable here and this is a also an issue for the SABP PPI Forum too because the Trust's actions compromise them. The PPI mechanism was never intended to be the only way that patients , carers and members of the public were allowed to involve themselves in shaping services. If the Trust frustrates the FOIA process this places more pressure and work for the PPI.
I'm sure they now realise this.
Its also clear we need more local feedback to ascertain how successful we have been to date. I like the idea of finding out more about the other schemes as well so lets create a campaign e-mail address for people to arrange stuff like visits and actions on . If someone wants to create one and admin it I'll post it here otherwise I'll knock one up. . Maybe we could add a newsletter too.
As an aside, when is SABP's next AGM?
Yeah go on, you are so reliable and good at organising us so you do the email. But I promise to do some extra work later. I'll be the getaway driver! (That should give them something to think about...)
Lol....I cant see well enough to drive anyway so think you have just secured the getaway driver position Jill...:)
I'll leave things for a few days in case anyone else wants to create and admin the campaign mail account ( put your hand down please Mr Kinsey ...)and if not I'll create one and do a newsletter or something.
There is also an important and not unrelated user campaign kicking of in Birmingham , any chance of getting a blog or site up about it Mr S as we're getting visitors from the west midlands. We can even help out if need be.
Whats Kicking off in the west mids?
Hope to link to the blog for it soon.
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