Disability and employment: a comparative critique of UK legislation

The social and employment rights of people with disabilities are now an issue of political importance in most advanced industrial economies. This paper examines the UK's employment policy on disability against international comparators. The first section identifies two dominant international disability paradigms, one deriving from the USA and focusing on strong anti-discrimination measures and civil rights, the other European in origin and relying primarily on compulsory employment quotas and extensive state intervention. The UK's recently introduced Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (hereafter DDA) is shown to sit outside both these paradigms. The DDA's anti-discrimination stance is limited by restrictive definitions and qualifying conditions that make it but a pale reflection of its US counterpart, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), while, by abandoning employment quotas, it diverges from the systems of compulsory employer obligation being developed in other EU countries. The paper's second section uses data from a UK study of employer attitudes towards the employment of disabled people to show that the likelihood of encountering good practice is linked to the presence of a specialist HR manager which itself is associated with increasing size of workforce. The final section asks whether the newly introduced DDA has the power to address the gaps in good practice identified by the research more effectively than the US and continental European alternatives.