Disabled people earn £4,300 less a year – but Labour STILL want to force us into work

How much will you earn between now and the rest of the year? Well if you’re disabled it’s effectively nothing. Thursday 7 November is Disability Pay Gap Day, and due to the disparity in pay compared to non-disabled people, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) says that from today most disabled people will be working for free for the next 54 days.

Disability Pay Gap Day

While the Labour Party plows ahead with its plans to force disabled people into work, the union has revealed that disabled people earn on average a staggering £4,300 less a year.

The TUC’s annual Disability Pay Gap Day report has revealed that non disabled people earn 17.2% more than disabled employees or around £2.35 more an hour. This adds up to on average £82.25 per week for 35 hour workers. This has widened by £700 since just 2022.

It’s also even worse for disabled women, as usual, who the TUC found earn on average £4.05 less an hour than non-disabled men. That’s £141.75 less a week and over £7,300 less a year than a non-disabled man. 

More than the weekly shop

Disabled people are already struggling in the cost of living crisis and we know it costs significantly more to live life at the same standard if you’re disabled, but today the Disability Pay Gap report reveals it’s even harder – because the disparity in wages a week is more than the average weekly shop.

A food shop for an average household is approximately £63.50, meaning more disabled people will struggle to feed themselves. This is reflected by the fact that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found last year that 57% of households with a disabled person in them experienced food insecurity and seven in 10 went without essentials. 

The TUC says that under the last government a toxic combination of lower earnings, the extra costs faced by disabled households and insecure working conditions increased hardship for disabled workers and their families. 

Oh but wait it gets worse. We’re also more likely to be on zero-hour contracts

Zero hours lives

Disabled workers are also more likely to be on despicable zero-hours contracts compared to non-disabled people. And non-white disabled women are three times more likely than non-disabled white men to get stuck on them.

Zero-hero contracts give awful bosses control over how much employees can earn and can be the only alternative for disabled people who find it harder to get and stay in employment than non-disabled people. Being stuck on low-wage contracts like these mean employees are stuck in a cycle of poverty as they can’t plan for the future. For disabled people, it means they have to work any hours they can despite the effect it will have on their conditions. 

It also makes employees less likely to challenge unacceptable behaviour by their bosses as they have that threat of not getting shifts that they need to feed themselves. 

Labour are apparently committed to ending zero-hour contracts, but we will wait and see what they have coming to force disabled people into work. 

Whilst Labour are determined to force disabled people into work, they’re still showing very little commitment to actually supporting us to get and stay in work that won’t make our lives worse.

Disability Pay Gap Day is not the only issue

On top of no commitment to narrowing the pay gap, apart from mandatory pay gap reporting, there’s also still the backlog to Access to Work (AtW) which only getting bigger- that’s if you aren’t having your support cut.

As Ellen Jones points out, AtW is so bad at the minute that you’re probably better off quitting your job and getting a new one. 

This is due to AtW focussing on those starting new jobs over those already in work who need support. Ellen points out that the waiting list for freelancers is 38 weeks and for those already in a job it’s 30 weeks, yet we both heard from a mutual friend who was assessed in under a week when starting a new job.

I suspect this is to both fight the backlog in some way and show their commitment to getting people into work- but it’s not enough to just get us into work, we have to be able to stay there too.

Labour still committed to forcing disabled people into work

If Labour are truly committed to getting disabled people into work, instead of using us as a spending scapegoat, they need to show it. And that starts by ensuring we earn a living wage in jobs that we can stay in safely and securely. 

Featured image the Canary