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The disabled people's movement and employment policy The trend in disability employment policy, from collective to individual solutions, in many ways parallels recent changes in academic thinking and writing about the nature of disability and society's response to disabled people. Disabled writers and activists reject patronising and charitable images, deny professional judgements of what disabled people 'need', and argue for individual control over how resources are spent in order to maximise independence.

There have been constant calls for individual rights, and demands that individuality and choice be recognised. We should be wary of confusing independence with individual responsibility. Recent Government policy documents promoting the independence of disabled people have smuggled into the discussions notions of individual responsibility. The challenge is to reconcile this emphasis on rights and individualism with collective responsibility for promoting employment opportunities for all sectors of society. Returning specifically to the new right not to be discriminated against in employment, we might query the adequacy of setting the employer's duty and obligation in opposition to the individual's rights and responsibilities.

In such a formula, in the absence of sanctions, the employer cannot discharge an obligation to disabled people as a whole but only to the potentially aggrieved individual. Such a 'privatisation' of rights and corresponding responsibilities could prove a limiting factor in any discrimination legislation. Disability theory and its policy agendas have to consider how to reconcile opportunities and independence, without setting one person against the other.

More fundamentally, there is work to be done to understand how discussions of individual responsibility and social obligation relate to individual and social constructions of disability. There is a danger of becoming so preoccupied with individual responsibility that we return by a circular route to the individual as the locus of 'problems'.

If disabled people and their organisations are to make a substantive contribution to the formulation of future UK disability employment policy, they must reflect that, if policies relate only to individuals, the opportunity to reduce the number of people disabled by their working environment is severely limited. As RADAR (1993) reports, many people with impairments need flexibility in the organisation of work tasks and time schedules, such as regular breaks, or flexible hours.

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