People with intellectual disability have the same human rights!
20/01/2014
Dignity for Disability MLC Kelly Vincent has welcomed the call from Maurice Blackburn lawyers today, urging people with intellectual disability to preserve their rights and ensure the Federal Government does not infringe their capacity to seek due damages following a High Court ruling in May 2013.
Last week the Government announced plans to establish a payment scheme for intellectually disabled workers who have been underpaid, according to the High Court ruling, while working at sheltered workshops.
“This decision comes after two men with intellectual disability, Gordon Prior and Michael Nojin, challenged the use of the *Business Services Wage Assessment Tool (BSWAT) and took the matter all the way to the High Court,” says Dignity for Disability MLC Kelly Vincent.
“The High Court’s finding shows this is an obsolete method of payment and yet it is still used by 300 Australian Disability Enterprises (ADEs) to pay 20,000 people as little as one dollar per hour.
Ms Vincent said this and other aspects of the assessment tool send a concerning message about the way Government views these workers.
“Just because you have an intellectual disability, does not mean you shouldn’t be paid a fair living wage. The Government must urgently move the wages of people at ADEs into the modern day by abandoning the BSWAT and implementing a Supported Wage Tool.
“For too long, people with disability have been forced to endure society’s low expectations of them. Sheltered workshops, which segregate people with disability from mainstream employment options and offer dull jobs that I have heard described as ‘soul-destroying’, are still too often seen as the default employment option for people with intellectual disability.
“To my mind, essentially forcing people to work in such an environment just because they have a disability is like saying that the way to fix racism in the workplace is to take all the employees of ethnic backgrounds and put them in a separate factory where they can’t bother the white employees anymore.
“Surely it would be far better to give people the opportunity to actually afford things like private rental, for example, rather than forcing them to languish for years on waiting lists for taxpayer-funded accommodation. Half of all people with disability in Australia already live at or below the poverty line. Yet in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, Governments are still allowing situations in which a comfortable living standard is only for the lucky ones, and this is shameful. It is fiscal apartheid.
“Given the Federal Government is looking to reduce the number of people receiving the Disability Support Pension, I think this is a very timely reminder of the outrageous situation that people with intellectual disability find themselves in in relation to income support and employment.
“I believe that even the use of the Supported Wage System should be a temporary measure to help break down the stigma of people with disability in the workplace, so that eventually employers will elect to hire people of all abilities on their merit, and pay them accordingly. International experience shows us that this is possible, and has hugely positive outcomes for the lives of workers and their communities.
“When I travelled to Scandinavia I was frequently embarrassed by the shocked looks on people’s faces when I told them of the employment situation here. It’s time for government to take some real leadership in this area before it, too, gets any redder in the face,” said Ms Vincent.
*The BSWAT calculates a worker’s wage using a combination of a competency assessment (scored out of 8) and a productivity assessment, based on the percentage of productivity a worker with disability can put out, compared to a benchmark, such as the productivity of a non-disabled coworker.
