In Berlin this Tuesday, a crowd of disabled workers marched on the Bundestag, demanding what the British Disability Discrimination Act has granted since 1995: equal pay for equal work. The irony is, of course, that the British law itself is a shadow of its former self, eroded by decades of neoliberal neglect. Yet the Germans, usually so meticulous in their engineering, have left their disabled citizens stuck in a workshop economy, earning pittances while their able-bodied counterparts enjoy the fruits of a boom economy.
This is not a breaking news story. This is a moral scandal that has been unfolding for years, and the rest of Europe is too cowardly to call it what it is: a betrayal of the postwar social contract. The British benchmark, weakened as it may be, remains the gold standard.
Why? Because it at least recognises the principle that a disabled worker is a worker, not a charity case. The German model, by contrast, treats disability as a welfare problem, a burden to be managed, not a right to be upheld.
We have seen this before: in the Roman Empire’s neglect of its veterans, in the Victorian workhouses. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And the rhyme today is one of quiet barbarism dressed up as efficiency.
The British should be proud, for once, that their much-derided legal framework offers a lesson to the continent. But they should also be ashamed that they have let it slip. The German protestors are right to demand more.
They are the canaries in the coal mine of European social policy.
