Disability Politics and Trade Unionism in Britain: Comings together and Movings Apart

The interactions of liberatory disability politics and the British workers' movement since 1890 have been characterised by intense periods of collaboration and long histories of silence and mutual misrecognition. In this presentation, I trace the shared and divergent interests of disabled activists and the mainstream workers' movement since the formation of single impairment unions in the 1890s. With particular focus on the 'Long crisis of capitalism' in the 1970s, I argue that the structural restrictions on trade unions and un(der)employed disabled people arising from the decay of Keynesianism dis-incentivised collaboration from the 1980s onwards, and address some of the strategic problems for disabled trade unionists generated by this impasse