Living with Disabilities in Austere Times

By Kelly White, Linchpin; Friday, September 16 2011 - Infoshop News
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2011091611572

People living with disabilities know that their experiences of interdependence, of society and its power relationships, could not be less important to politicians. Instead, their lives and experiences are commonly reduced to essentialized biomedical limitations. The disabled and their allies know that the experience of disability can best be described as a process enacted through social relations; that every service society provides us with is the result of a fight — a refusal to accept less. All around the world we see that in this current phase of capitalism, in which deficits are being used as an opportunity to slash social services, the only ‘solutions’ being advocated come in the form of individual escape and increasingly strident calls for externally imposed discipline.

Austerity is proving to be a time where the relations of power reveal themselves.

In Toronto, Rob Ford is introducing his own policies of austerity – preparing to lower spending by gutting public services. Ford pays lip-service to the needs of people with disabilities, for example by declaring Community Living Day and publicly affirming “the ability and rights of adults and children with an intellectual disability to participate and live in their communities,” yet less than a year later is preparing to cut the very services that make this possible: libraries, accessible transit, and community centres, to name a few. People with disabilities, like all marginalized people in this city, rely on public services – not as luxuries, but as lifelines to safe access to a self-determined life within their communities. To suggest cutting these programs and/or contracting them out to the private sector based on the feedback of a corporate consulting firm, rather than on consultations with service- users themselves, is an insult. Indeed, these types of international cost-cutting ‘austerity’ measures, unsurprisingly, are having a disproportionate effect on the disabled.

In the UK, people with disabilities took up the fight against austerity back in May, when they joined together in an unprecedented march of thousands. Proposed austerity measures there will make independence and everyday life impossible for many – with the government demanding 3.5 million people with disabilities sacrifice over £9.2 billion in critical support by 2015. Government officials claim that these cuts will result in more disabled people moving back into the workplace, and are framing the cuts as a way of catching people who are “cheating the system.” This rhetoric is similar to Toronto, where during a recent mayoral debate, Ford suggested financial incentives would encourage companies to hire workers with disabilities. The policies that this type of thinking inspires, combined with welfare and ODSP rates that keep people with disabilities impoverished and hungry, will ensure nothing but the continuation of a cycle of precarious work – the hallmark of a system that is not designed to promote inclusion.

People with disabilities increasingly understand that they will [be] among the ones charged with paying for Ford’s self- created “deficit” in the city of Toronto. One thing seems clear: people with disabilities and their allies in this city need to prepare to join the fight against austerity – the fight against Ford and his agenda.