Woman, 52, Found Fit For Work And Told To Play Down Sickness History To Employers

Extract from Kate Belgrave’s blog:

Outside one of the North London jobcentres this week, I spoke with woman in her early 50s who signs on for JSA and works for several hours a week as a cleaner (she’s one of the many people I meet at jobcentres who must claim JSA because they need to subsidise the crap wages they’re pulling at low-paid, part-time work). This woman said she once worked as a dinner lady, but had to leave that job, because she has a heart condition (an enlarged heart and an erratic heartbeat, etc). She said that getting up at six o’clock in the morning for the cleaning job was a struggle, because of her heart problems. But hey. That’s us today. Nobody cares about older women with heart conditions. They can still drag a vaccum-cleaner about between pains and palpitations. Needless to say, this woman had been chucked off ESA, because she’d been found fit for work.

She said that a family member found the cleaning job for her. She felt that getting work through family and friends was her only real option, because of her sickness history. She didn’t think that she was likely to land anything substantial through more formal job application routes. Her health and her sickness record worked against her. Anyone who has ever got a job knows that you usually have to give your new employer your sickness record and sign some sort of declaration – and that your last employer can even be contacted by your new one for your sickness history. Depends a bit on where you work and how robust HR is, I guess, but I think we can safely say that it can be hard to leave your sickness history behind. This woman said that she’d even been told by an adviser somewhere that her best shot was to play her sickness record down, or to not really mention it until she had to, or something along those lines. So – that was great.