Maximus-owned Remploy slashes pay of disabled experts by half
The care watchdog has allowed a US outsourcing giant to slash the pay of disabled people by more than half when it takes over two contracts to manage service-users who work as expert advisers on care home and hospital inspections.
Two of the three new contracts to run the Experts by Experience (EbE) programme – in which people with experience of using care services take part in Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspections – have been awarded to Remploy, which is now mostly owned by the discredited US company Maximus.
But even though the three new contracts are supposed to begin on 1 February, they have still not been signed, and CQC has admitted it “may take several more weeks for the negotiations to be complete and the contracts to be signed”.
Existing EbEs who have spoken to Disability News Service (DNS) are furious at how the watchdog has treated them.
Read more: Maximus-owned Remploy slashes pay of disabled experts by half
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This is outrageous; is it lawful?
Tweeted @melissacade68
Mike, yet another great blog
Keep up your tireless work
Sid
Sorry if they want to do this with private hospitals fine that’s down to them, but the NHS is paid for by the British tax payer and there is no way a foreign company should be setting the taxation of British citizens!
The original rate of pay wasn’t very high at all at about £30K pa only just above the average UK pay, and this is for specialists in their field, ensuring care homes etc. were up to standard for the vulnerable living in them. Slashing it to below the Living Wage says it all, knowing how Lord Fraud has already said disabled people are worth less than their co-workers suggesting £2 ph for some, he would obviously think that £8 is more than fair. I would support them for a total walk-out and strike.
(I hope that Sue Marsh can find a way to explain this mess, in her £70K role as Maximus’s “Customer Experience” manager or whatever. We all know of that company’s dreadful track record, which seem to help not harm their ability to get contracts from the crooked govt.)
Not surprised by this, as I work as an ‘Expert by Experience’ (AKA service user) at a university, having done so for 4 and a half years – late last year we were informed that our hourly rate would be reduced by 2 thirds, without any further discussion or negotiation. The course director renegotiated the rate after we pointed out that as the role requires us to draw on distressing mental health issues and experiences, it might be worth paying us a bit more than the minimum wage – even then it’s 2 thirds of our previous rate for the same work we were doing before. One of our number has already quit, causing anxiety amongst the tutors as service user involvement is a mandatory requirement – ie the course won’t meet its agreed standards without it. Yet it’s not important enough to not reduce our rate of pay. With delicious irony, the course is part of the department of psychological health and wellbeing – they are teaching trainees something they don’t practice themselves…
Why didn’t you all walk out, and say you would publicise your reasons for going, and wouldn’t return unless pay was restored?
I was reading some figures recently that showed something along the lines of one quarter of 28 million people working in this country are living on less than the equivalent of the minimum wage. It included self employed, working retired government pension aged people, zero contract hours and p/t over 20 hours a week. add to that all those retired living on state pension, some 6.5 million and you have 14 million people living, either working or having worked, on less than the living wage. Anyone who is earning above £15,000 is doing alright, they just haven’t realised their pay is worth less now than it was in 2009. Add to this the unemployed (including the ones who are sanctioned and therefore, not included in the official figures)disabled, part time single parents, families on H/B and taking up child benefit and child tax credits and you have some 6.5 million more people living below the poverty line. That amounts to 20 million people in this country who are scraping a life in abject penury. You can’t blame people for hanging on to their jobs of £20,000 with the job market the way it is, if the alternative is to be sacked for whatever excuse can be found. There’s no winning this poverty war and it can only get worse the longer the right wing elitists are in power.
They’ll get away with it, the Yanks will have offered our greedy, money grabbing posh boys and girls a fortune to keep their mouths shut and let them get away with this, it is no surprise how brutal Maximus are, the Americans aren’t very tolerate to a lot of things, disabled and poor people being two of them so they’ll be relishing doing all of this!