'Good' reasons and 'suitable' jobs: The tyranny of traffic lights

“When people show you who they are, believe them,” warned Maya Angelou. 

It’s no surprise, then, that following cuts to disabled people’s funding, disability-led community innovation projects, and key workforce development agencies, any residual benefit of the doubt from disabled people towards the National-Act-NZ First coalition Government has well and truly evaporated. Not content with sticking it to disabled people, this past year has seen a relentless series of attacks on Te Tiriti, whānau Māori, children, the media, arts and culture, and trans communities. The list is so long and wide-ranging that it’s almost overwhelming.

Perhaps that’s the point.

So when the Ministry of Social Development announced changes this week to how they communicate and enforce sanctions towards people receiving a benefit - including disabled people - dressed up as ‘supporting people into employment’, it felt like a disingenuous, calculated punch to the gut. One final blow designed to make being poor so devastatingly hard, that we’d just give up altogether. In a revealing moment earlier this week, when asked what happened to people who lost their benefit, Social Development Minister Louise Upston shrugged: “Not sure”.

Under the newly-announced traffic light system, any disabled person receiving the Jobseeker Benefit (or anyone receiving the Supported Living Payment who has been assessed as able to work) will begin in the hazy, four-laned glory of a green light setting. One transgression, however, and you’re instantly plunged into the orange setting, irrespective of whether or not the transgression actually happened. From this moment, Work & Income’s job is done – the poverty train is in motion – and it’s up to you to avoid getting hit. You have five working days to organise a meeting with them, where you’ll be required to grovel sufficiently miserably as you attempt to convince them that your reason for the transgression is a good one. If it's not deemed good enough, you'll be placed in the red setting, and your benefit will be reduced or stopped.

This, of course, is familiar territory for disabled people. Many of us have experience of detailing, with excruciating and undignified specificity, the intricacies of a pain flare. Or why your pre-booked mobility taxi didn’t turn up, or the experience of a week-long migraine, or dynamic changes to your physical movement, or how sometimes simply existing as a disabled person in the world can be all you can absorb this week. Only to be met, in response to it all, with a blank stare and some variation of, “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. The rules are the rules.”

While in the past there had been degrees of flexibility around how and when sanctions are enforced, the new traffic light system does away with a person-centred approach in favour of one-size-fits-all rigidity.

That’s not the only example of the Government giving case managers a green light to make subjective judgments about disabled people’s lives. Should you find yourself in the #blessed position of being offered a job, but alas, that job not being appropriate for your accessibility needs, I’m afraid that’s too bad. Knowing yourself, your needs and your spoons will be insufficient grounds to refuse such an opportunity. 

Instead, if you’re offered a job, it won’t be up to you to determine its suitability or compatibility with your life. It will be up to Work & Income, and this time, the rules are chillingly clear: “If this is … the first time you haven't accepted a suitable job offer, without a good reason, your benefit will … stop, if you don’t have dependent children.” Once again, that insidious subjectivity creeps in. A suitable job offer. A good reason. According to them. And if you don’t meet their threshold, they’ll stop your benefit entirely, on the spot. The savagery of it all is breathtaking. Not everyone can drive a digger, Mr Luxon.

The Government has publicly committed to reducing the number of people on the Jobseeker Support Benefit by 50,000. What’s clear now is the drastic lengths they’ll go to reach that goal, including consigning disabled people to the social scrap-heap. None of this should come as a huge surprise, I suppose; when you look at the world as they do through the lens of ruthless productivity, of course our lives aren’t as valuable. At least now they’re saying the quiet part out loud.

When people show you who they are, believe them indeed. It’s well past time we believed this lot, because the worst is yet to come.

Photo credit: Getty Images

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