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Workers with Disabilities Between Legal Changes and Persisting Exclusion: How Contradictory Rights Shape Legal Mobilization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Aude Lejeune Open the ORCID record for Aude Lejeune [Opens in a new window]  and
Julie Ringelheim
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Abstract

It has become commonplace within disability sociolegal scholarship to argue that, in the last 30 years, a new legal and policy approach to disability has emerged, leading to a paradigm shift from a social protection framework to an antidiscrimination model. Some authors have stressed, however, that the new model has not fully replaced the older social protection approach. Yet little is still known about how the coexistence of these different models impacts on the everyday experience of disability in the workplace and on potential legal mobilization. Based on interviews with workers with disabilities who mobilized the law to obtain reasonable accommodation in Belgium combined with an analysis of evolving Belgian legal schemes relating to disability, this article explores how interactions between social, labor, and antidiscrimination rights shape legal mobilization of persons with disabilities in the workplace. We find that individual's initial self-identification as workers or persons with disabilities influences how they frame their claim and the kind of legal norms they refer to in a first stage but that both their identification and their rights consciousness evolve and change through the course of legal mobilization as they interact with various professionals and navigate between the different concepts and rights available in current law.

Type
Special Issue: Disability Legal Studies Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 983 - 1015
Copyright
© 2019 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This article was written as part of the collective research project Disability and Reasonable Accommodation. Import and Uses of a New Legal Instrument in France and Belgium [in French], with support from the Mission de recherche Droit et Justice (Lejeune et al. 2017). We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers at Law & Society Review for their insightful comments on a previous version of this article.

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