From Impairment to Incapacity : Educational Inequalities in Disabled People's Ability to Work

Significant numbers of working-age people in high-income countries claim benefits due to incapacity. This is conventionally explained as the result of people rationally ‘choosing’ to claim benefits, or as ‘hidden unemployment’ due to a lack of jobs, with claim rates much higher among the low-qualified. However, neither account considers whether low-qualified people find it harder to deal with an impairment in the workplace, and are therefore genuinely more incapacitated. This study explores these issues using 32 in-depth interviews in England in 2009/10. It finds that there are considerable differences in people's ability to respond to impairments, with some – but only some – able to avoid incapacity through workplace flexibility, adjustments, or changing jobs. Better-educated people had more of these choices, partly because education is associated with job flexibility (which allows people to work around their impairments). Education also played a direct role; it is not just the case that less employable people found it harder to get work (‘hidden unemployment’), but that they found it harder to get suitable work, and were therefore genuinely incapacitated. It was therefore only some lower-qualified people who were left in a ‘Catch-22’ situation where they were not fit enough to do jobs they could get, and not employable enough to get jobs they were fit to do. Moreover, there were further inequalities among those with partial fitness-for-work limitations, with wealthier people having more choices around ‘struggling on’. The article concludes by drawing together the implications for research and policy.