Representative Bureaucracy and Disabled Employees in the British Public Sector

The focus of this chapter is a comparison of disability discrimination claims in the private and public sectors. For this comparison, we undertook an analysis of over 750 disability discrimination claims lodged at the Employment Tribunal in England and Wales. Taking into account the number of disabled people in each sector, we found that disabled employees in the British public sector lodge more claims of discrimination at Employment Tribunals than their private sector counterparts, yet their claims are more likely to fail at a full hearing. We argue that this finding is because disabled employees in the British public sector are more aware of equality issues than their private sector counterparts, subjectively perceiving discrimination. Yet the policies and practices that result from representative bureaucracy, that is, higher levels of representation and formal policies, and the equality duties found only in the public sector, result in judges mostly finding that disability discrimination in the public sector has not occurred, compared to such discrimination in the private sector.