GMB Protests Remploy Factory Closures

The GMB, Britain's General Trade Union, is campaigning to save Remploy factories from closure based on an alternative structure of efficiency, growth and success. The BBC are covering the story here. The GMB/Remploy factory workers webpage raises the issues here.

Remploy's own vision , buried on its website here , is based on cuts and an expectation that disabled people can be shoehorned into mainstream work.

Remploy's view is backed by charities like Mencap and Mind, organisations that are no great practitioners in the equal opportunities field themselves as in spite of all the rhetoric they cherry pick their own workers and believe in scrapping sheltered employment because in addition to claiming to represent disabled people they run their own mainstream employment schemes themselves and get a good income out of these whether they actually get people into secure and lasting meaningful paid employment or not.

In other words, political correctness aside, it pays the likes of Mencap and Mind to denigrate sheltered employment as they are part of a growing poverty industry which talks of thrusting everyone into mainstream employment.

Again its the same top down 'all or nothing' approach that we have seen the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust and the Surrey PCT waste money on over the last year.

This campaign blog will be celebrating its 1st Birthday next month yet its still not clear what the fate of the Surrey & Borders Old Moat Garden Centre and its disabled workers will be or if the centre will survive in any way shape or form at all.

Disabled people require and have a right to real choices around training, employment , benefits and having their treatment and support needs met.

This is simply not happening.

At the moment disabled people find themselves at the wrong end of a top down social engineering project which has organisations which dont even employ their own service users , such as the Surrey & Borders Partnership and South London & Maudsley's NHS Trusts being steered by Government quangos ( NIMHE etc ) and their kept academics ( Bob Groves, Helen Lockett - SCMH in this case ) to abandon their service users to corrupt Job Brokers and incompetent ' Employment and Training ' organisations with the view of catapaulting them into mainstream work irrespective of whether they can cope with it or not or what happens next.

I for one support the GMB and Remploy factory workers campaigning against closures because although I think there could be better policies in place at Remploy, sheltered employment is going to be the natural and right choice for some disabled people just as sheltered housing is. It is also ridiculous for Government and the increasingly toadyish major charities to think they can impose a shallow form of ' Social Inclusion ' upon disabled people from above. This doesnt empower anyone , it simply crushes choice.