From community activists to 'jobs brokers'

How has the job of supporting people towards employment changed over the last 30 years?

Lee Humber

I will be looking at how the job of supporting people towards employment has changed since the beginning of the 1980s based on my interviews of people with learning difficulties and social care workers in the London Borough of Camden.

At the beginning of that decade an adult training centre in Camden offered training opportunities and paid work for a relatively small number of people from north London. Training offered included simple woodwork, administrative and laundry work. I will consider conflicting accounts of staff there provided by those who attended.

In 1984 a sheltered work opportunity was set up in Camden Town by a local voluntary sector organisation, the Camden Society. They opened a café called Applejacks and it offered training in cooking, serving customers and other skills. Also during this period the Local Authority provided a small number of jobs in local government. I will provide reflections from care workers and people with learning difficulties on both of these routes into work.

Today, though some of these employment opportunities remain, others have gone to be replaced by a much more 'flexible' notion of job brokering. Here, central Government fund a small number of supported employment providers to source mainstream employment opportunities and support people towards and in them and I will provide reflections on this role from some of those in post.

I will explore differences and continuities from 1980 to today through an analysis of oral histories of workers who were responsible for setting up and running services in the 1980s and of those working today. I will examine an older history of people supported into work by their local communities and ask 'has the community been professionalised out of its employment supporting role?'.