Dr Clare Williams is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Birmingham. Her work on law, political economy and disability is informed by her activism. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/law/williams-clare
Keywords: Ability capitalism, Disability, Welfare reforms, Law’s constitutive role
On 18th March 2025, Secretary of State for Welfare and Pensions Liz Kendall stood up in the House of Commons to propose sweeping cuts to disability welfare in the UK.[1] The goal was to get disabled people into jobs – any job, at any cost to their wellbeing, with ‘only the most severely disabled who will never work’ protected.[2] Such labour market activation policies aim to push disabled people into the labour market by cutting welfare, rather than reforming labour markets to make them more accessible to disabled people. Yet at the same time, the government was busy ‘quietly dismantl[ing]’ Access to Work, a centrally administered grant programme designed to alleviate some of the barriers disabled people face in accessing employment, with disabled claimants losing their support and, ultimately, their jobs.[3]
Of course, this was merely the latest attack on the subsistence of disabled people that continues a tradition of cutting disability benefits and portraying those relying on them as ‘scroungers’.[4] In response, protests were organised, rallies were held, and the reforms were paused pending the forthcoming Timms review into disability welfare, which promises a flawed and deeply inadequate model of co-production with disabled people in contravention of the requirements set out in the UN’s Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).[5]
But the welfare proposals should not have been surprising, coming on the back of government reforms to increase employer national insurance contributions (making it ‘more expensive’ to do business) and the Employment Rights Bill (making it ‘riskier’ to do business).[6] By pushing disabled people into the labour market, the welfare proposals weaponised disability as a technology of market governance to increase competition for jobs and drive down wages, partly compensating businesses for the costs of the other reforms.
My theory of ability capitalism explores how and why disability, as a legally-constituted technology of power, is operationalised through law and policy to manage markets.[7] While research exists on how markets ‘gender’ and ‘race’ actors, disability has tended to linger as the ‘poor relation’, both in terms of analytical framing and legal redress.[8] This is despite the fact that, historically speaking, disability logics have informed many other grounds of minoritisation, with women being excluded on account of their ‘inferior’ bodies, racialised groups on account of their ‘inferior’ minds, and sexual orientation classified according to medical categories of ‘deviance’.[9]
Some 25 years ago, Marta Russell developed her money theory of disability, demonstrating how disability logics come to be operationalised to manage both micro- and macro-economic functions.[10] Through the construction of disability (and disabling) epistemes, those least likely to realise the maximum surplus value for the employer through the application of their own labour power were transferred from the productive to the redistributive sphere, where they were corporeally commodified, becoming consumers of goods (such as a wheelchair) or services (such as a bed in a care home). Given that labour markets are typically designed by and for ‘standard’, that is, non-disabled people, those with ‘non-standard’ bodies, minds and energy levels naturally comprise a significant part of any ‘reserve army of labour’.[11] Accordingly, through law and policy reform, this group can be sorted and shifted in or out of labour markets, responding dynamically to the prevailing needs of capital.
What is missing from this account, however, is an exploration of the processes through which these shifts occur; the focus of ability capitalism. By understanding markets as inherently legal institutions, ability capitalism turns to the constitutive role of law in setting the foundations for markets that disable. In turn, wider ontologies of disability emerge reflecting their origins in the devaluation of disabled labour power.
How does the law disable?
The law plays a constitutive role in market constructions of disability that extends beyond labour markets. By exploring disabling legalities in labour, housing and debt markets, we can identify four key, mutually constitutive dimensions by which the law constructs disability: predistribution, coding, revealing/concealing, and demurring to economic imperatives.
Processes of legal predistribution, that is, an initial pre-allocation of typically property rights and interests, not only construct power relations but shape actor preferences for ‘standard’ actors.[12] We can see this in market preferences for standard or ‘ideal’ workers, owners, renters, or borrowers: those most likely to realise the maximum surplus value for the employer, disadvantaging those unable to align themselves with this standard.
Then, through legal concepts such as the ‘standard employment relationship’, typically instantiated in the ‘juridical form’ of the employment contract in labour markets, standard rental contracts in housing markets, and standard lending contracts, we can see how the law ‘codes’ labour, land and money, relying on heuristics to construct the ideal market actor in the process.[13] At the same time, the third dimension comes into play whereby preferences, assumptions and expectations about ‘standard’ actors are revealed while those about non-standard workers are concealed, rendering them unavailable to challenge. In labour markets, standard assumptions might include where and when work tasks will be performed, while non-standard assumptions might specify that the worker can get themselves up and dressed independently and traverse an exclusionary built environment to reach the place of work. Notably, concealed assumptions are essential for the performance of revealed assumptions, once again requiring market actors to normalise themselves.
Finally, law’s propensity to demur to economic imperatives can be traced throughout the law, whether as policy objectives in tort, efficiency calculations in contract, or the underlying cost-benefit analysis of the reasonable adjustment. While courts are typically reluctant to engage in overt calculations especially in the context of the reasonable adjustment, it remains an ever-present spectre informing judicial decision-making. Nevertheless, the hidden figure of homo economicus looms large in the shadows of the law, subjecting those unable to align themselves with the rational, white, able-bodied man of mainstream, neoclassical economic theory to exclusion, devaluation, and stigma justified on account of the ‘moral economy of market justice’.[14]
So what?
What emerges, then, is a framework through which we can understand how law, as the language of power, operates as a fulcrum, balancing the conflicting demands of capital with those of workers, owners and borrowers. Accordingly, as Russell presciently demonstrated, legal equality rights cannot, ‘and were never designed to’ realise the full, substantive inclusion of disabled people as markets both rely on and require disability, as a core technology of power, for their effective and efficient function.[15] In the process, those with ‘non-standard’ bodies, minds and energy levels come to be othered, devalued, and stigmatized.
Yet if rights are not the answer, what might be? Ability capitalism has some suggestions here which I will explore in future posts. For now, though, state welfare remains one of the key bulwarks against the construction and weaponisation of disability as a technology of market power under our current political economy. While the Timms review is in progress, the government must urgently commit to restoring and enhancing schemes that alleviate the barriers that disabled people face, including Access to Work, Disabled Facilities Grants, and Personal Independence Payments amongst others. Anything less would be an admission that some of society’s most vulnerable people no longer matter.
[1] Liz Kendall, ‘Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Speech to the House of Commons on Pathways to Work Reform’ (Department of Work and Pensions, 18 March 2025) <https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/secretary-of-state-for-work-and-pensions-speech-to-the-house-of-commons-on-welfare-reform> accessed 22 November 2025.
[2] This framing is highly problematic for multiple reasons. I also note that the language used in this post aligns with the British social model of disability that distinguishes between an underlying impairment and the socially-constructed disability that arises from inadequate built and social environments. UPIAS, ‘Fundamental Principles of Disability’ (Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) and The Disability Alliance 1975) <https://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/40/library/UPIAS-fundamental-principles.pdf> accessed 20 July 2024.
[3] John Pring, ‘Government Figures Show First Signs of “Perverse” Cuts to Access to Work’ Disability News Service (16 October 2025) <https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/government-figures-show-first-signs-of-perverse-cuts-to-access-to-work/> accessed 22 November 2025.
[4] Kayleigh Garthwaite, ‘“The Language of Shirkers and Scroungers?” Talking about Illness, Disability and Coalition Welfare Reform’ (2011) 26 Disability & Society 369.
[5] Article 4.3 of the UN CRPD requires states to co-produce disability policy with disabled people and their representatives. As no Deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations (DDPOs) wanted to co-produce reforms with the government for the Timms review, the government has set up its own Independent Disability Advisory Panel for which the applications window has just closed. The Panel application guidance makes it clear that the government is under no obligation to incorporate Panel advice into policy. See Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Guidance on the Application Process and Further Information on the Independent Disability Advisory Panel’ (Gov.uk, 14 October 2025) <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/expression-of-interest-to-join-the-independent-disability-advisory-panel/guidance-on-the-application-process-and-further-information-on-the-independent-disability-advisory-panel> accessed 22 November 2025.
[6] HM Revenue & Customs, ‘Changes to the Class 1 National Insurance Contributions Secondary Threshold, the Secondary Class 1 National Insurance Contributions Rate, and the Employment Allowance from 6 April 2025’ (gov.uk, 13 November 2024) <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-the-class-1-national-insurance-contributions-secondary-threshold-the-secondary-class-1-national-insurance-contributions-rate-and-the-empl/changes-to-the-class-1-national-insurance-contributions-secondary-threshold-the-secondary-class-1-national-insurance-contributions-rate-and-the-empl> accessed 22 November 2025; Department for Business and Trade, ‘Employment Rights Bill’ (gov.uk, 18 October 2024) <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/employment-rights-bill-factsheets> accessed 22 November 2025.
[7] Clare Williams, ‘Ability Capitalism: Law’s Constitutive Role in Constructing Disability’ [2024] Industrial Law Journal <https://academic.oup.com/ilj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/indlaw/dwae043/7826570> accessed 18 February 2025.
[8] See, inter alia, Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Penguin Book 2021); Kerry Rittich, ‘Out in the World: Multi-Level Governance for Gender Equality’, Feminisms of Discontent: Global Contestations, Ashleigh Barnes (ed) (Oxford Scholarship Online 2015); Diamond Ashiagbor, ‘Race and Colonialism in the Construction of Labour Markets and Precarity’ (2021) 50 Industrial Law Journal 506; Michael J Oliver, ‘Capitalism, Disability and Ideology: A Materialist Critique of the Normalization Principle’ (n.d.) <https://www.um.es/discatif/PROYECTO_DISCATIF/Textos_discapacidad/00_Oliver.pdf> accessed 27 November 2023; Michael Oliver and Colin Barnes, The New Politics of Disablement (2nd edition, Palgrave 2012).
[9] See, inter alia, Douglas Baynton, ‘Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History’ (VCU Libraries Social Welfare Histories Project, 2001) <https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/woman-suffrage/disability-justification-inequality-american-history/#:~:text=Supporters%20of%20racial%20inequality%20and,a%20justification%20of%20that%20status.> accessed 9 July 2024; Richard Amm and Dai O’Brien, ‘Find the Others – Disability and Anarchism’, Handbook on Anarchism (Routledge forthcoming) <(copy shared by author)>; Helen Meekosha, ‘Decolonising Disability: Thinking and Acting Globally’ (2011) 26 Disability & Society 667.
[10] Marta Russell, ‘Disablement, Oppression, and the Political Economy’ (2001) 12 Journal of Disability Policy Studies 87.
[11] ibid; Catherine Hale and others, ‘Energy Impairment and Disability Inclusion: Towards an Advocacy Movement for Energy Limiting Chronic Illness’ (Centre for Welfare Reform 2020) <https://citizen-network.org/uploads/attachment/681/energy-impairment-and-disability-inclusion.pdf> accessed 5 July 2022.
[12] Margaret Somers, ‘Legal Predistribution, Market Justice, and Dedemocratization: Polanyi and Piketty on Law and Political Economy’ (2022) 3 Journal of Law and Political Economy <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1nb5f92v> accessed 22 February 2023; Andrew Lang, ‘Market Anti-Naturalisms’, Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought, J Desautels-Stein & T Christopher (eds), (Cambridge University Press 2017); Paddy Ireland, Property in Contemporary Capitalism (Bristol University Press 2024).
[13] Judy Fudge, ‘The Future of the Standard Employment Relationship: Labour Law, New Institutional Economics and Old Power Resource Theory’ (2017) 59 Journal of Industrial Relations 374; Zoe Adams, Labour and the Wage: A Critical Perspective (Oxford University Press 2020); Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press 2019).
[14] Somers (n 12).
[15] Russell (n 10).