‘If Labour Is Serious About Overhauling Disability Benefits It Must Stop Letting Employees Work People Into Sickness’

Juana is a 56-year old cleaner from Colombia. Every day, Juana wakes up in her flat in Brixton at 4am and takes two buses to work. Her first shift is early, but at least it’s contracted, from 6am to 9am, at a central London university.

After punching out, she takes another bus to her second job, on a zero-hour contract. She finishes at 2pm and sneaks a nap in an empty meeting room or cafe.

At 5:30pm, Juana goes back to the university for her final job of the day. She works until 11:30pm and returns home at 12:30, knowing she will only get three and a-half hours of sleep before she has to wake up again. 

Juana has been a cleaner for nine years. At her university job she is paid the London Living Wage of £13.85 per hour. Her other job pays far less, and overall, working 12 hours a day, she takes home about £2,400 pounds a month, barely enough to cover rent and expenses. 

Juana isn’t a specific person. Rather, she is a composite of dozens of cleaners we have worked with in our capacity as trade union employees. Her work schedule and earnings are typical of many of London’s cleaners, and everything we describe has happened to real people. By examining her journey, we hope to better illustrate the ways in which the current system not only fails sick and disabled workers, but can in fact lead to long-term disability. 

We write this following Labour’s latest announcement that they intend to “overhaul” the disability benefits system, with a particular focus on Work Capability Assessments.

While Labour are yet to put meat on these plans, their commitment to making the same amount of welfare cuts proposed by the previous Conservative Government means these changes are likely to result in people losing eligibility. Accompanying this is the usual rhetoric around supporting disabled people into work.

What’s missing is any serious engagement with what “work” really looks like for millions of people across the UK, and what it would actually take to have a job market that is truly supportive of disabled people. 

When we imagine work exclusively in terms of white-collar office jobs, we overlook the vast number of workers in physically-demanding roles such as cleaning, security, and health and social care.

Jobs where 12-hour shifts are often the norm, or where the pay per hour is so low workers are forced to cobble together 12 or more hours from various different sources, often working six or seven days a week. Under these conditions it is easy to fall sick, and the support needed to recover often isn’t there.

Let us return to Juana. Over the years, Juana develops tendonitis in her shoulder. A condition common to cleaners, who often spend long hours going through the same repetitive motions. She first started feeling pain four years ago, but she worked through it as she couldn’t afford to go off sick. If she had, she would’ve only received Statutory Sick Pay, currently £116.75 a week. 

This represents one of the first major barriers to workers taking time off when they need it. While contractual sick pay is standard in many white-collar jobs, manual workers, (who are often more likely to get sick or injured, and less able to work when this happens), often don’t enjoy the same benefits.

Where contractual sick pay is offered, there can be serious barriers to accessing it, including pressure from management; misinformation about entitlements; and fears for job security. The latter of which aren’t always unfounded. 

Two years ago, Juana’s pain grew much worse. She went to the doctor, who gave her a fit note saying she shouldn’t be lifting heavy weights. The university’s HR department then referred her to an Occupational Health Specialist, who also recommended she not lift heavy weights. Furthermore, the Occupational Health Specialist stated that, in their professional opinion, Juana should be considered disabled, therefore obliging the university to make “reasonable adjustments” for her under the 2010 Equality Act. 

This is the system that already exists to support disabled at work. Under the Equality Act, employers are already obliged to make “reasonable adjustments” to accommodate disabled employees, whether they are new to the company, or become disabled over the course of their employment. This most often includes amending a worker’s duties.

The first problem arises, however, with the interpretation of the word “reasonable”. With no definitive industry-specific standards, companies have ample leeway to argue that the adjustments requested place too great a financial or operational burden on the company, and to either reject them altogether, or negotiate poorer conditions than those stipulated by medical professionals. 

The second problem arises from the enforcement of these adjustments. Juana returns to work. Initially, her need not to lift heavy weights is respected, but little by little her manager begins assigning her to take out the rubbish again. And the same pressures that make it hard for employees to access contractual sick pay, also make it hard for Juana to resist the erosion of her adjustments: pressure from management, and fears for her job security. 

Last year Juana’s shoulder finally gave in. She lost almost all motion in it, and went on long-term sick leave. After a year out of work, the university initiated a disciplinary process, which culminated in her being dismissed from work due to medical incapacity. 

This is the reality for many workers in the UK. Under current British law, there is little to stop disabled employees being dismissed should their disability render them unable to perform their job, so long as the proper process is followed.

This is the case even if the conditions of work themselves were the initial cause of their disability. And, while decisions can be challenged at an Employment Tribunal, the threshold for proving failure to make reasonable adjustments can be quite high, and the process long and emotionally taxing.

And this is for employees with permanent, fixed-hour contracts. Employees on precarious contracts, or working in the gig economy, can have an even harder time asserting and defending their rights. So what can be done about it? 

Increasing sick pay and making it more accessible is an obvious place to start. Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) in the UK is among the lowest in Europe. In Juana’s case, SSP would’ve barely covered 20% of her weekly wages.

In contrast, Germany guarantees at least 70% of wages for up to 78 weeks. Increased sick pay, from day one, would prevent workers from exacerbating chronic conditions by feeling forced to work through illness and pain. 

Secondly, unions need to push for sectoral standards for pay, working conditions and safety. This is particularly important in atomised industries like cleaning, where workers are often ill-served by the current workplace-specific bargaining system.

Sectoral bargaining — a common model in Northern Europe — would allow unions the leverage to coordinate and set industry-wide standards. These standards could cover things like how many square metres a person can be reasonably required to clean in a given time. Such guidelines would also assist occupational health specialists in making recommendations to employers. 

Industry-wide bargaining isn’t a new idea to the UK; it was a key part of Labour’s 2021 “Fair Deal for Working People” before being quietly dropped in 2024.

Unions working together could pressure the cleaning industry into imposing reasonable workload standards and a real living wage — and likewise for other industries such as health and social care, where low pay and long hours are the norm. 

Alongside this, the Labour Government could push for a more dramatic increase in the minimum wage, since low wages force workers into taking on more hours than are compatible with their health and wellbeing, especially in physically-demanding roles. 

Ultimately supporting disabled people at work is less a matter of pressuring employees than it is of pressuring employers. It is the conditions of work, and the expectations of employers, that force disabled people out of the job market and into the horrific poverty of the UK benefits system.

These conditions are often the most acute among the so-called essential workers of the COVID-era: those whose jobs are tough, exhausting, and indispensable to the daily functioning of society.

If the Labour Government is serious about supporting disabled people at work, they’d do well to pursue policies that foreground their needs, rather than continuing to allow employers to work people into sickness, then fire them for being sick.