GMB, the union for staff at Remploy, responded to the announcement today in Parliament re the closures of further Remploy factories.
Jerry Nelson, GMB National Officer for Remploy, said:
“This is bad news dressed up as good news. This announcement means a further 9 Remploy factories are to close. They are marine and frontline textile businesses in Leven, Cowdenbeath, Stirling, Dundee and Clydebank, and the packaging business based at Norwich, Portsmouth, Burnley and Sunderland.
Remploy trade unions denounce this cruel and vindictive Government as two faced.
At the stroke of a pen they destroy the lives of the Remploy workers and their families and carers. They quote the factories lost £58 million last year. What they don't tell the British public is that contracts were not sought for work. Yet Philip Green and other big national and multi-nationals dodge ten times this amount in tax every year, and they still believe in giving to the rich and robbing the poor.
This Government has no right to rob our Remploy workers of their dignity and destroy their work based communities.
Les Woodward, GMB convenor at Remploy added:
"This is just another nail in the coffin for disabled workers who regardless of government lies and duplicitous figures do not get work. They are disadvantaged and ignored and there is no government policy to change that in the future.
Together successive governments and the very disabled charities that are meant to help disabled workers have considered to make thing worse for the very people they are meant to help.
When 2015 comes these atrocious acts will not be forgotten we will mobilise an army of disabled people and bring these posh boys back down to earth with a crash.
Sheltered workshops are allowed under EU procurement rules and can successfully keep disabled workers gainfully employed if supported by public contracts.
Instead this government used the Sayce Report and RADAR, Mind, Mencap, Scope, RNID and Leonard Cheshire as “Trojan horses” to close the Remploy factories.
Radar characterised Remploy as some out of date solution with attempts to stigmatise it as a form of ghettoisation and linking it to old institutional forms.
These organizations started with an aspiration we all share where all disabled people are treated in an equal way in employment and that ideal state may lead to a completely different view of what support is required.
This is what happens when disabled charities make “the best” the enemy of the “good”. They started with resolutions that will not be achieved in the short run. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and they wento through the years sticking to that ignoring real needs, and they end in the grotesque chaos of disabled charities – disabled charities – used as Trojan horses to enable redundancy notices for disabled workers in 54 locations across the UK. This is just the latest slice of bad news.
The Tories knew what they were doing using these "useful idiots" who are party to this latest despicable announcement.”