Boycott Workfare team up with Pluto Press to expose violence of workfare

"A new book chapter using testimonies compiled by Boycott Workfare exposes the violent impact of forced labour.

"When we talk about what’s wrong with workfare, we often mention the horrifying material impact on people’s lives of the benefit sanctions that underwrite it. The political impact of unwaged work is also important – the way it attacks workplace rights and destroys our freedom. And workfare is psychologically violent and humiliating: it is coerced labour that’s supposed to build skills and motivation but obviously does nothing apart from offer free work to businesses and charities.

"Now, in a freely available chapter of The Violence of Austerity, just published by Pluto Press, the accounts of 97 people who were on workfare schemes between 2011 and 2015 show how workfare is not only ruthlessly exploitative, but can also mean being forced into dangerous work in which health and safety laws are violated as a matter of routine...."

More at http://www.boycottworkfare.org/the-violence-of-workfare-exposed/

Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech

Uploaded by Dude Swheatie of Kwug

I believe that this video has resonances with the striving for disabled peope's striving for equality in the UK of today.


Eight years ago (31 March 2007), a UK Government signed up to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), to little mass media attention.(1) A century before MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech was launched in the capital city of the USA, President Abraham Lincoln gave the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address during the American Civil War. (2) (3)

Both King and Lincoln died from assassins' bullets. Blacks now considerably outnumber white people in American prisons. And since the UK's signing of the UNCRPD the life prospects of disabled people in the UK have actually got worse not better. Whoever is elected into UK Government today, we must reclaim our power and put more pressure onto mass media to publicise our case. We must not leave it to an undemocratic mass media to spell out what our 'options' are.

We must not give in to what King called 'the tranquilising drug of gradualism'. He said that the gulf between previous proclamation promise of equality for American blacks and the subsequent realities had been explained away by 'insufficient funds'.

I say, "Beware the rights denying halucinogen of 'austerity'. What really matters? What is priceless to our society?"

Further Reading

Disability News Service search finds re UNCRPD. (4)

Notes

(1) http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2007/03/30/uk-government-signs-un-convention-on-disabled-peoples-rights/
(2) Emancipation Proclamation - Hear and read the full text https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM3HS3rr-w0
(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Bojjx_Dew
(4) http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/?s=uncrpd