The story of Daniel White, a groundsman at Collett Park in Shepton Mallet for 27 years, who was made redundant because of his learning difficulties when the maintenance contract for the park was taken on by Landscape Group, has received global attention. A petition to reinstate Daniel has gained 5,800 supporters.
In fairness to Landscape Group, they said they spent 12 months trying to find a role “within the contract and beyond which could offer a safe working environment in line with this employee’s needs”. They were unable to so do, despite engaging an occupational therapist to assess Daniels limitations and his capabilities.
According to his mother Daniel has never been late or had a day off sick in his 27 years at the park and had been promised that his job was his life.
The world has changed dramatically in the last decades and even more so since the banks crashed the global economies. With the rise and rise of vulture capitalism and the free market, unrestrained, economies, where money is the measure of worth, everything loses its value.
Daniel, who is perfectly capable of doing his job and has done so for 27 years, has fallen foul of a valueless system and the price of a contract. It begs the questions, can we really carry on in this way and do we want to?
Daniel is not a human resource, he is a man, he has a life, his job has provided him with meaningful work and the means to look after himself. He a man who, perhaps, because of his learning difficulties, found his life’s meaning in his work and was able to work to live. Isn’t that the kind of world in which we should want to live and raise our children in and is that too much to ask for or expect?
Daniel then, is a beacon of our times for a more just and sane society, where our values are not measured in hard cash and nor are our lives. I do not know what motivated nearly six thousand people to sign the petition to save Daniel’s job, I know only my own. I signed it in protest for the value of a life that is not and should not be measured in monetary terms, because such terms are an affront to human dignity and an insult to the value of this mans labour in his beautifully tended park. The pictures I took today when I visited Collett Park, on a grey and overcast autumn day, tell their own story.
Let Daniel White Keep His Job Petition
Keith Lindsay Cameron
