Introduction
Under the pressure of civil associations for the rights of people with disabilities, the establishment of a multiracial democracy in 1994 marked a change of paradigm around disability in South Africa. The government made the issue of disability a matter of social development (Heap, Lorenzo, and Thomas 2009) and adopted the social model of disability. According to this model, conceptualised in Britain in the 1980s, disability is not based on an individual medical condition, but results from the interaction between a certain type of body and its environment. This interaction includes the physical environment as well as social and political dynamics, such as exclusion and stigmatisation. This paradigmatic shift has strongly impacted the spirit of South African public programmes around disability since 1994. While people with disabilities were previously targeted by social security in the form of disability grants, the focus has progressively moved to the notion of empowerment and the right to work.
Despite the growing importance of work in the public discourse around disability, past research in South Africa has mostly studied the economic dimension of disability through the programme of disability grants (Emmett 2006; LeClerc-Madlala 2006; MacGregor 2006). These grants provide the only direct public payment targeting citizens between 18 and 65 years old, apart from the smaller grants delivered to family caregivers (grants-in-aid and care dependency grants). As the third largest grant in South Africa, after old age pensions and childcare grants, these disability grants are part of a security system that effectively reduces extreme poverty in the country, and play an important role in family livelihoods (Mosoetsa 2011; Ferguson 2015). For instance, in his analysis of the personal income of the active workforce in 1999, Emmett (2006) found that people with disabilities were over-represented in the category of people earning between ZAR 1 and 799 per month. His research has also shown that people with disabilities were under-represented among the very poor (no income per month). The author has concluded that people with disabilities live in relative poverty – relative because it is reduced by the disability grants whose effects are particularly strong in a country where the unemployed do not receive any public cash transfer. Interesting as it is, such a statistical approach does not gives us a real idea of the diversity of livelihoods that people with disabilities can mobilise. Furthermore, it reproduces the idea that people with disabilities depend upon state resources for their survival, which ignores the claims raised since the 1970s by people with disabilities for their inclusion in the labour market and the consecutive transformations of disability policy undertaken 20 years later.
This bias in South African disability studies in favour of the analysis of social grants and their impacts may be partly explained by the assumption that social grants and work are mutually exclusive. An example of this assumption is provided by Mitra (2008), who has studied the negative relationship between an easier access to social grants and the employment rate of adults with disabilities. By systematically juxtaposing work and public aid, such studies implicitly reproduce without questioning the ideological link between work, dignity and welfare that underpins social policies in South Africa, and in many other countries. This connection has been criticised for emphasising the need to ‘discipline’ welfare recipients into the ‘respectability’ of wage labour, as the only remedy to the growing dependency on governmental support that poor citizens have developed over the years (Barchiesi 2011; Ferguson 2015).
Drawing from such critical studies, I develop in this article a larger analytical framework to document the livelihood of South Africans with disabilities, so as to examine the interface between disability, social welfare and the labour market. This perspective turns away from the analysis of the culture of poverty as well as from the phenomenological descriptions of the uncertainty and the immediacy of economic practices among the poor populations (for a critique of this approach see Ross [2010, 102–133]; Rubbers [2017]). The objective is to understand how people actively invest in their future and make use of a particular ‘regime of redistribution’ – that is,
not only the direct and readily visible ways in which states affect income inequality, such as taxation and cash transfers in the form of old-age pensions and other grants, but also the indirect or more opaque ways, including policies affecting education and the labour market. (Seekings and Nattrass 2005, 4–5)
Providing work for people with disabilities
Since the development of the South African welfare state, the prevention of dependency has limited the reception of social grants to the ‘deserving poor’ (Seekings 2008). Historically, this category encompasses the citizens who cannot work: the children, the elderly and the people with disabilities. Furthermore, this welfare system has always combined programmes of direct payments with a strategy to create work opportunities (Seekings 2002; Davie 2015). For Barchiesi (2011, 250), the stand for job creation taken by the post-apartheid government underlines a consistency in South African history: social security remains the exception to the general rule according to which people need to work for their living:
For the post-1994 democratic government finally, employment became the exalted condition of real social citizenship, the basis of family life, the norm of participation in national development, and the cure for the latitude and moral corruption generated by redistributive claims and the ‘culture of entitlement’.
In South Africa, disability grants were created in 1946 – two decades, more or less, after the development of rehabilitation as a medical sub-discipline.2 The idea was to normalise their bodies to send them back to work, and to limit financial compensations to the people who were failed by medicine. This conception of disability as an incapacity to work was progressively challenged internationally by the tenets of the social model. In South Africa, similarly, self-help groups providing work for people with disabilities opened in the late 1970s, which led to the establishment of Disabled People of South Africa (DPSA) in 1984, an association lobbying for the development of work opportunities for people with disabilities. DPSA explicitly mobilised the ideological link between work, respectability and social citizenship: by demanding work, people with disabilities were calling for full citizenship, and requesting participation in the labour market was a way to enhance their social inclusion as well as to empower themselves.
In the beginning of the 1990s, DPSA strategically reframed its demands in terms of human rights and presented people with disabilities as part of the disadvantaged population under the apartheid regime to fit the new democratic narrative. This tactic resulted in the adoption of the social model as the new national understanding of disability in governmental policy. Such a paradigmatic shift reinforced the dominant discourse of Transformation promoted by the new government and its allies by creating a historical divide between the new progressive era and the old regime, whose policies ‘were based on a value system of segregated development as expressed through apartheid policies on the one hand, and the need to segregate and “fix” persons with disabilities on the other, thereby further entrenching violation of human rights and dignity’ (DSD 2014, 3).
Conversely, the post-1994 democracy recognises the social rights of people with disability and, among them, the right to work. Although disability grants were maintained, the 1990s saw the adoption of a legal corpus that promotes employment opportunities for people with disability through anti-discrimination legislation (e.g. Constitution of 1996), obligations for employers to develop reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities in the workplace (Employment Equity Act of 1998), and the creation of quotas such as a target of 2% of workers with disabilities in the public sector (Economic Empowerment Framework Programme of 1997). By contrast with the political discourse focusing on able-bodied citizens, which undermines the agency of the poor because it forces them to meet conditionalities by the state, the emphasis on work in the disability sector and through disability social policies is thus framed as a progressive recognition of the agency of people with disabilities.
This singular apparatus combining disability grants and affirmative actions in the labour market puts people with disabilities in a unique category of citizens who are both part of the deserving poor and the disadvantaged workers (next to black people and women). This paradoxical conflation results from two cohabiting conceptions of the disability: one that still associates disability with the incapacity to work, and the second that underlines the economic potential of people with disabilities. More recent dispositions seem to favour the second approach. On the one side, the disability grant process was restructured in recent years to standardise its medical assessment. The new Disability Management Model was developed to regulate the access to disability grants, so as ‘to ensure that the grant is properly targeted at those who are functionally disabled’ (Kelly 2013, 39). Such measures induced an important decrease in the number of disability grant beneficiaries (see Figure 1), which contrasts with the continuous growth of the overall number of other grant beneficiaries (see Figure 2). Disability grants are more generally perceived nowadays as a safety net for coping with the vulnerability of people with disabilities to unemployment, a situation that needs to be addressed first through job creation programmes and anti-discrimination legislation. A good example of this trend is provided by the White Paper for the Rights of People with Disabilities (WPRPD), legislation adopted in 2015 in place of the Integrated National Disability Strategy of 1997 as an effort to adapt the South African law to international conventions.
Designed as an umbrella strategic plan, the WPRPD provided general norms and standards to build ‘a country wherein all citizens have the capabilities to grasp the ever-broadening opportunities available’ (DSD 2015, II). In this approach, ‘employment contributes to economic security, physical and mental health, personal well-being and a sense of identity’ (Ibid., 94). With the objective of ‘eliminating the need for charity or welfare in the individuals of the group’ (Ibid, 46), this legislation adopted ‘a medium to long-term focus on providing social grant beneficiaries with alternative income sources through gainful work and training, among others, through public employment programmes’ (Ibid., 93). The empowerment of people with disabilities through work is here framed as an economic gain for the country: ‘The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimated in 2009 that South Africa loses about 7% of its annual GDP [gross domestic product] due to exclusion of persons with disabilities from the workplace and the subsequent productivity loss’ (Ibid., 91).
Despite this growing focus on work as an empowering experience for people with disabilities, the next sections will show that the reality faced by people with disabilities remains disempowering and frustrating.
Socio-economic profile of people with disabilities in South Africa
To date, the Census 2011: profile of persons with disabilities in South Africa (Statistics South Africa 2014) constitutes the most interesting statistical data concerning the population with disabilities in the country. A first result of this census is to underline the lower level of educational attainment of people with disabilities in comparison with their able-bodied peers (see Figure 3), especially in the case of severe impairment. Notwithstanding this discrepancy, the factor ‘disability’ does not seem to particularly influence individual employability: 62% of the active able-bodied population have a job against 63.4% of people with disabilities (Ibid., 117). The difference in education could, however, explain the important disparities regarding individual income: able-bodied people earn, on average, double what people with disabilities do. As such, the report underlines income inequalities relating to the type and the severity of the impairment, gender, race and the area where people live.
First, the nature as well as the severity of the disability affects the possibilities for work and income. Visual impairment is considered a less problematic condition, followed by physical disability. In any case, the more severe the disability is, the less likely the individual will be employed.
Second, the report underlines racial and gender disparities. For instance, the average annual income of Coloured people with severe physical disabilities is estimated at ZAR 17,717, with an employment rate of 17.3%. The data relative to the Africans in a similar situation reduce the annual income to ZAR 14,851 and the employment rate to 16.6%. On the other side, White people suffering from an identical condition earn on average ZAR 83,786 annually, for an employment rate of 41.6% (Ibid., 125, 131). It can be noticed that in the same year, the annual amount of the disability grants reached ZAR 13,920. Furthermore, women with disabilities are said to find work less easily than their male counterparts and to be paid 33% less on average (Ibid., 130).
Third, huge disparities are apparent regarding geographical areas. Rural areas have both the fewest opportunities for work and the lowest incomes. However, agricultural zones employ more people with disabilities than urban districts do. In the case of severe motor disabilities, 23.2% of this population living in urban zones were working at the time of the survey, and 9.6% in rural areas, but 35.9% in agricultural land (Ibid., 126). Therefore, the Province of the Western Cape that covers mostly urban and agricultural land has a particularly high rate of employment among people with disabilities: 70.9% for all types of disabilities in 2011, but only 21.6% for people with severe physical disability (Ibid., 121–122).
These data show the importance of tackling the issue of disability through an intersectional approach. Yet it gives very little attention to the way people with disabilities experience work or about the nature and length of the various occupations. The ethnographic interest in these questions adopted in the next section will show the precarity of people living in Mitchells Plain who barely fit in the category of the employed, but who do not rely solely on their disability grant either.
The precarity of work for people with locomotive disability in Mitchells Plain
These study cases are part of a larger study on the subjectivities linked to locomotor disability in Mitchells Plain. Mitchells Plain is a 43 km² zone in Cape Town that was developed as a Coloured township in 1974. Its population exceeded 310,000 people in 2011 (City of Cape Town 2013, 2). Since the end of apartheid, the area has remained predominantly Coloured, with little improvement in the fields of education and employment. No data exist on the exact number of people with disabilities in the area. However, two elements tend to make one believe that this number is more significant than in more central, relatively well-off, neighbourhoods of Cape Town. First, the high level of drug and gang-related violence in the area3 results in numerous disabling injuries. Another explanation relates to the low prices of housing, which make the area attractive to families whose income is strained by the situation of disability.
As such, the data only examine the professional insertion of people living with a certain type of impairment. The selection of these study cases respects gender parity and focuses on people who subjectively identified as ‘disabled’. All have been or were still members of associations for the rights of people with disabilities at the time of the research. The origins and severity of their disabilities and the time when they first appeared all varied. An important point to note is that all of them had been disabled for more than 10 years at the time of the research, a period that allowed them to ‘accept’ their condition as well as to develop some professional expectations and objectives.
Furthermore, Mitchells Plain remains predominantly Coloured and, as such, the data provided cannot be generalised too hastily to other racial groups. It is also a low- to middle-income urban area with resources unavailable in other parts of the country, especially in rural zones. Yet the 2011 census recorded an employment rate of 60.95% in the active population of Mitchells Plain (City of Cape Town 2013), which is a bit lower than the national rate, and more than 10% of the households claimed to have no income at all (see Figure 4).
Without any statistical weight, the documented case studies underline the agency of people with disabilities as well as the diverse tactics they mobilise to survive. We will see, however, that their options are often restricted to short-term contracts or learnerships, while permanent positions require a high level of education. Moreover, the experience of work for people with disabilities is often frustrating. Such frustration is partly linked to the experience of the disability, which brings a series of challenges, from colleagues’ acceptance to transportation costs, but is also strongly anchored in the precarity of the labour market, which fails to realise the agentic empowerment promised by the current South African policy. Current job creation programmes and established quotas fail to integrate the majority of people with disabilities into the labour market. In this context, people with disabilities are actively considering their options for a better life in line with professional and personal aspirations. The results produce a specific type of agency that mirrors neither the paradigm of social protection and its assumption of an incapacity to work and of a culture of dependency, nor the figure of a citizen-worker empowered by their participation in the economic development of their country.
The hope to raise one’s qualifications through education and learnership
While many people with disabilities have to quit their studies because of their impairment, the cause of early school leaving is not limited to disability. In 2011, only 34.7% of the population aged 20 years or older living in Mitchells Plain reported having their matric (i.e. having graduated from high school). Main causes include starting work early to bring extra income into the family, but also involvement in street gangs for men. In the face of these educational levels, the state has developed opportunities for citizens to achieve their secondary education at a later stage, so as to create a more qualified workforce. The urban context facilitates access to these opportunities, as much for able-bodied as for disabled people.
Tarryn, a woman in her thirties, born into a Coloured family of the Cape and paralysed in a road accident while studying for her matric, used this option. Forced to drop her studies due to the accident and having lived in isolation for a certain time, Tarryn decided a few years after the accident to get her high school diploma. She subscribed to a nine-month training course for ZAR 700, in a Mitchells Plain public school close to her father’s home. Her disability grant provided for the school fees, some food for the family, and the room Tarryn rented at her father’s.
Despite her diploma, Tarryn could still not find a job. She said the matric was not leading to employment any more due to the current state of the labour market. She then tried to pursue studies at the university, but received neither the necessary bursary nor the complementary rehabilitation required to live alone on the campus. This young woman, like many other people with disabilities living in the Cape Flats, was stopped in her formal education by the lack of funding, of accommodation and of transport.
In 2014, Tarryn joined a local organisation for people with disabilities where she heard about paid learnerships, which exist outside of the formal educational system. Part of the governmental effort to create a better qualified labour force, some of these learnerships specifically target people with disabilities. As such, they ensure the accessibility of the offices and of the educational material, and favour a better understanding around disability and the development of social relationships on the basis of a shared condition among the trainees. In the Cape Town disability sector, available courses include accounting, information technology, catering, wheelchair and bicycle workshops, creation of jewellery and so forth. Some programmes impose further restrictions regarding the beneficiary’s age or require personal banking details. The latter prevents some of the poor who do not have an individual bank account from registering.
The first motivation to follow a learnership comes from the direct income it provides, i.e. around ZAR 3000 per month, that can be combined with the disability grant. Since transportation costs are not included, many people favour close-by learnerships, regardless of their interest or utility. However, the limited time of the contracts – from a few days to a year – is the biggest drawback of these learnerships. Some people learned to bend the rules and register for two programmes at the same time to merge the two salaries, or they follow the same training twice so the income lasts longer. Although this time limitation is often criticised by the trainees, it allows people to handle their work schedule as they see fit. For instance, Tarryn learned about these programmes in 2014, but she managed her applications in relation to her other activities:
At the moment, I would rather do admin[istration] work like an office job, you know, but I haven’t applied yet. […] I would be dumb not to apply, but I will wait … . After [the wheelchair race of] George, I can go for the assessment.
Next to this short-term income, following a learnership remains an attempt to find stable employment. Some training courses including Tarryn’s entail an internship in a private company. The hope, sustained by the trainers, is that the internship will lead to recruitment. Consequently, these learnerships not only provide short-term income for the trainees, they also help them imagine a better future built on new qualifications and new opportunities. For many, these hopes fall short. In Tarryn’s case, late payments from the learnership prevented her from continuing, as she could no longer pay her driver. Although she hoped to resume her training in 2016, her health condition deteriorated early that year and, after several hospitalisations, she passed away in 2017.
Next to this recurrent issue of transportation, trainees also miss classes due to health conditions. Finally, completing the training rarely leads to a job, as another participant of the research stated:
While presented by the government as a way to improve one’s employability, secondary education and specific training for people with disabilities remain somehow inadequate to the needs of the current economy and therefore fail to achieve trainees’ dreams for a better life. One could even say that they contribute to the casualisation of work as they offer short-term underpaid labour to various employers in the form of internships. Similarly, the possibility to retain the disability grant when one earns less than R3000 justifies the low income paid to people with disabilities. This is true for the learnerships, but also for protective workshops and other governmental programmes, as the next story illustrates.Developing a network in the disability sector
When I met Salim, he was in his thirties and was living with nine of his relatives – his parents and his brother’s family – in a two-bedroom house. None of them had a permanent job. Although Salim’s father had irregular contracts as a painter, the only sustainable income was Salim’s disability grant. The family originated from Athlone (another Coloured neighbourhood of Cape Town) where Salim spent most of his teenage years. He dropped out of high school due to repeated episodes of belligerent behaviour and from then on, spent most of his time in the streets with friends. To set him straight, his mother sent Salim to Mitchells Plain to live with a relative and work in a construction company, only for the young man to join a gang quickly after the move. His mother only learned about Salim’s gang membership after he was shot and hospitalised. Back with his family in Athlone after rehabilitation, Salim started using drugs to deal with pain and depression. Soon the family lost the parental home due to late payments and moved to Mitchells Plain. It is not clear whether their financial difficulties were related to Salim’s condition.
One year after the move to Mitchells Plain, Salim decided to finish his matric. To avoid transportation costs to a specialised school, he studied with his aunt. His first motivation was to progress in life:
I am very positive about the future. I want to do something positive with my life, you know. At the beginning, after the accident, I was too depressed. I just used drugs and smoked a lot. I was also drinking and partying ‘cause I was really young, I was only eighteen years old. But as time goes, I accepted things. It is just a wheelchair. Your mind, you know, it is still active. You can become what you want to become. You just have to work harder. Nothing is easy in life.
At the same time as Salim resumed his studies, he joined a protective workshop managed by a local association for people with disabilities. Protective workshops are extremely controversial in the disability sector for two reasons. First, their manual activities (woodwork, basketry, gardening, sewing or recycling) limit people’s income. Salim’s group would meet every Wednesday to engage in recycling, such as building objects with wooden clothes pegs or cleaning clothes hangers for a mass retailer – ZAR 2 for every kilogramme of reconditioned hangers. A percentage of the benefits was redistributed to the host association, which drew accusations of exploitation by its critics. Second, most protective workshops take place in closed centres. The conditions are said to reproduce the segregation and exclusion experienced by people with disabilities in the apartheid times. However, these two limits also cater for some participants’ preferences. Most members underline their wish to keep busy. Participating in a protective workshop shows that you are, in some way, doing your part. It answers to the pressure to be working, while not putting too much obligation on the participants. In addition, keeping busy is also a way of being social. In this regard, protective workshops offer a safe environment both physically, since the Mitchells Plains group meets in a community centre surrounded by wire fences and a protected entrance, and emotionally. There is no need to fear stigmatisation or to train people about disability in this specific space. For these reasons, some participants remain in a protective workshop for years, despite the main objective of the workshop being to prepare the workers for the job market.
Another advantage of the workshops for Salim was to develop his personal contacts within the disability sector. The social worker in charge of the workshop helped him to train as a peer supporter4 and to practise this occupation under a four-month contract from the Extended Public Work Programme (EPWP). Created in 2004 to finance short-term contracts, this programme follows specific quotas: over five years, a million South Africans should have benefited from such a subsidised occupation, among whom 40% had to be women, 30% young people, and 2% people with disabilities (Department of Public Works 2009, 15).5 It also includes a contribution to the Unemployment Insurance Fund, allowing former workers to receive compensation for a certain time after the end of their contract. Although useful, this complementary income remained limited in time and in value, as once again it was combined with the disability grant. Furthermore, Salim described difficulties in filling in the requested documents: signing the forms to prove his work was problematic due to his limited hand mobility since the attack.
Many people with disabilities invest their time and effort in the disability sector as a way to find work, but only a few succeed. Here as well, occupations are at best often limited in time and offer only small additions to the disability grant, as opposed to full-time waged employment, and that only when they do not merely represent a symbolic participation in the labour market, a way to keep busy, as in the case of the protective workshops. Similarly, state-funded programmes offer short-term solutions instead of creating sustainable jobs, and their capacity to subsequently lead to a wage-earning position is doubtful. In this sense, Salim’s experience adds to Tarryn’s story. In both cases, the only sustainable income remained the disability grant, which represented a major resource for both households. Aware of this situation, people with disabilities often develop various tactics to improve their chances of finding long-term employment, which cannot be associated with a ‘culture of poverty’ or day-to-day survival. On the contrary, people with disabilities work at increasing their qualifications (through studies and training) and developing their network. Others also adopt small-scale informal practices. We will turn now to more successful stories in which people with disabilities secured stable employment.
The public sector as the ‘gold mine’
Gerard was in his fifties when I met him. This Coloured man left school when he was 17 to work in construction. A member of a gang and veteran of several incarcerations, he made the best use of the resources from both legal and criminal activities until he was paralysed following a knife attack at the age of 34. After rehabilitation that brought back the mobility of his hands, arms and right leg, Gerard was offered an office job, but declined. At that stage, he focused on the associative sector, working for a non-profit organisation for a few years until it closed. Over the years, Gerard accumulated training and learnerships of all kinds. He was one of the first peer supporters professionally trained in Cape Town, and he managed the sports hall of the rehabilitation centre in Mitchells Plain for four years, until new qualification requirements enforced by law led to his replacement.
Then Gerard co-founded a local association with a few other peer supporters involved in the rehabilitation centre. The idea was to develop a platform that would provide support for other people with disabilities and create job opportunities for the members of the association. Gerard used his construction skills to build access ramps for different affiliates of the group. He also benefited from an EPWP contract, which remunerated his work for the association over a six-month period. Due to recurrent arguments with the president of the association and the lack of a sustainable income, Gerard left the group two years after it formed.
At that point, Gerard provided intermittent and informal services in his neighbourhood, such as fixing household appliances and painting, but he mostly focused on formal job applications for a sustainable occupation. In April 2015, he applied for a one-year learnership in accounting that he had already completed, but that was well paid. He also answered an advert for a project manager in the construction industry. Yet none of his applications were successful. In this context, Gerard envisioned joining the public sector:
For me, for any people with disabilities, [getting a public job] is like hitting a gold mine. […] For instance, when you go to work, they will give you another wheelchair so that your wheelchair doesn’t get bad. You have a government subsidy, a housing subsidy, you get a rental subsidy. So you are basically fitted in.
Gerard’s case shows the long journey to waged labour. Recognised in the disability sector, he had to go through various short-term occupations to finally secure a position in the public sector. Once more, this story illustrates a specific agency where opportunity for work can be declined depending on one’s priorities. Finally, we will see that it is not uncommon for people with disabilities to find an occupation working directly with other people with disabilities – through the associative sector, in a medical centre or at the university as the next case will show – or that deals with disability indirectly, as in the department of social development. These occupations where the disability becomes a sort of asset can be apprehended as disability niches – that is, spaces characterised by benevolence or an exclusivity for the disabled condition.
The rebuttal of a systematic social demotion
Sharon is a young African woman in her thirties with both legs paralysed since she contracted poliomyelitis in her childhood. I met Sharon at the university where she has been working for a few years. She was living in the township with her two children. Sharon started our interview as follows: ‘Ah okay, the story of my life. Sharon from the Eastern Cape. Only disabled in the four children – three girls, one boy. And also the only educated’. The tone was set; she explained that she had studied in specialised schools, both at primary and secondary level. Supported by her mother, Sharon contacted various companies at the end of her matric to fund her university entrance. Thanks to the support of two well-known South African supermarket chains, the young woman moved to Cape Town and studied human resources. After her graduation, she took a complementary training programme funded by a bursary dedicated to youth with disabilities. Behind the pride of her success, Sharon’s account underlines how lonely she felt at the beginning of her studies:
Many times, I will be left alone and then I will have to do [the assignment] on my own. My first year, [other students] did not want to mix with me. How it changes this mind is that I was doing this 45-page assignment on my own and then I ended up with a better mark than their own. […] And that was even a shock for them that I could go outside and do my own research in places like libraries, you know, wherever, make appointment with companies, etc. And after, we become family until I graduated.
I am happy the way I am because God has created me like this or God has allowed this to happen and He is providing means. I am providing you [with information] and the members of my family [with money]. That is a big challenge for them, having two legs and being provided for by someone with disability.
Sharon’s atypical trajectory combines specific socio-demographic characteristics (being a black woman with disabilities makes her a perfect candidate for a learning fellowship as well as to fill quotas for her employers) with other elements like the presence of a specialised school in her area and a mother pushing her to succeed. Therefore, this example cautions against the systematic association of disability with social demotion and economic exploitation (Charlton 2000; Oliver [1996] 2009). In certain conditions, which I have termed disability niches, the impairment becomes an asset to further one’s studies or to find work, where siblings cannot. In other words, disability can be seen neither as a systematic disadvantage nor as a general asset in comparison with able-bodied people’s trajectories. At the junction between these two perspectives, I argue, rather, for an understanding of the way disability redefines the possibilities seized or created by the individuals and produces a specific type of agency. Finally, Sharon’s testimony shows that frustrations at work do not stop when employment is secured. Despite her success, she continues to identify strongly with the category of people with disabilities as she has to overcome specific challenges related to her impairment. Feeling different from her peers (at the university and at work) creates an experience of difference and exclusion that often forces people with disabilities to develop extra work to be accepted and treated as a peer, rather than a stranger.
Conclusion
In contrast to the studies focusing solely on the disability grants system, this article develops a larger analytical framework based on the concept of the regime of redistribution to understand the interface between disability, social welfare and the labour market. Such an analysis shows that people with disabilities constitute a unique category that is targeted by both social protection in the forms of direct payments and job creation programmes. In this context, the pressure on people with disabilities to work is reframed as a progressive recognition of their agency by the state. In this conclusion, I want to suggest that the current regime of redistribution keeps people with disabilities in a liminal situation.
As long as social protection focuses on the functional impairment, the underlying conception of the incapacity to work remains. This idea partly informs job creation programmes: through further studies, paid learnerships, protective workshops and even short-term contracts, the idea is to prepare people with disabilities for employment. This conception seems to imply that due to its specific condition, this public needs extra time to adapt to the work experience and requirements. In this light, the South African legislation seems to hesitate between defining people with disabilities as fit or as unfit for work. In some way, they remain both. Furthermore, these programmes fail at creating real opportunity for wage employment. Instead, people with disabilities move from one short-term contract to another. They remain students, special workers and so forth. More generally, they are not workers because they receive disability grants, but the variety of their attempts to remain active, to do their part and to better their future contradicts the idea that they are unemployed individuals who feel entitled to their rights and social benefits. The people I met responded to this liminal state by developing a specific type of agency. They have learnt to bend the rules, to follow a learnership, to postpone an application to go on holidays, and so on. Such behaviour strongly contradicts the general idea of a culture of poverty with a day-to-day management of uncertainties. On the contrary, they respond to the pressure to work by claiming their right to work, with medium- to long-term plans for the future. Conscious of the precarity of these expectations, the people I met have also learnt to negotiate their opportunities with their specific expectations and objectives.