Writing the wrongs

I really have enjoyed reading this blog, now I know it's here I'll be checking in on it daily!

Being disabled, I have a few issues with 'things' that I'd like to talk about and the anonymity offered by Write Disability makes it a perfect place to do just that!

But before I get into what annoys me, let me say this: Where I live the Government has made HUGE strides forward in regards to reducing physical barriers

When I was a boy, you never met a disabled person, they were either secreted away in a 'home' somewhere or kept quietly in a room. Don't even talk about access! Were we brave (and strong) enough to venture out by ourselves there was literally no chance of us being able to get into anywhere else, steps and narrow doorways made sure of that!

But spurred on by the brave few, physical access was starting to be addressed (made more urgent by the large amount of disabled soldiers coming back from the Vietnam 'war' and needing to be integrated back into society). Disabled rights activists took the battle to the United Nations (a misnomer if ever I heard one) and didn't take 'no' for an answer. 1990 saw the introduction of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which was a turning point for many countries, although things had been changing up till that point, after that peice of legislation was enacted many other countries made it a higher priority to enact their own legislation. The changes were decisive (helped along by technological changes might I add).

I've mentioned all this because I feel that if we loose sight of where we have come from, we will loose sight of where we are going to. Make no mistake - we still have quite a way to go!

Now, on to the thing that bugs me most!

Jobs... we are at a huge disadvantage, I just can't believe that there is so much ignorance and sterotyping by a employers (who like to think they are smarter than the rest of society). You can see it in their eyes as soon as you enter the room; they don't care that you can do X, Y and Z, all they see is a retard staring back at them, they will make all the right noises (usually compossed by their Human resources department), wind-up the interview with a big patronising smile, then put your application on the bottom of the pile. Bigotry now has political correctness to hide behind like never before.

But I'm not just going to write about the problems, I am going to go one step further and offer solutions!

Take the country I live in (New Zealand), they could:

• Give disabled workers a tax-free status,
• Allow ALL disabled workers (not just the blindies) to keep their core benefit while working,
  
• Give employers a 0.25% tax-break for every percentage of their workforce that is disabled,
• Subsidsed tele-working situations for disabled employees,
• FULLY inform disabled people of their rights regarding employment,
• Government needs to immediately buy any assistive technology needed for work (and enforce IT departments to put any needed software on their server) all of which follows the disabled employee from job to job,
• A central repository of jobs which a disabled employee would suit.

Call me naive, but I can't see why these wouldn't help... and as far as the tax-free status goes; why is it Jamaica can afford it but New Zealand can't?

You make some very interesting points [Name witheld as requested] - Ed.