The Health and Well-Being at Work Agenda: Good News for (Disabled) Workers or Just a Capital Idea?

Abstract

Health and well-being (H&WB) initiatives have increasingly appeared in workplaces, but are the subject of surprisingly little critical analysis. The terms H&WB have also become positively embedded in Human Resource Management (HRM) and academic vocabularies, often displacing disability, which, it is argued, is (wrongly) regarded as a negative descriptor. This article challenges the sometimes taken-for-granted assumption that employer-led H&WB initiatives are inherently positive. It considers how they are being used to undermine statutory trade union health and safety representatives, reinforce concepts of normalcy and ableism in respect of worker lifestyle and impairments, and individualize/medicalize experiences of workplace stress. Utilizing a critical disability studies lens debate challenges a dominant element of many H&WB programmes – employee resilience – and concludes that a social model of disability and workplace well-being is needed to focus debate on the social, economic and political causes of ill-health and dis-ability in workplaces under neo-liberal austerity.