Macho, mobile and resilient? How workers with impairments are doubly disabled in project-based film and television work

© 2016. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 (CC BY-NC 3.0) licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ Keith Randle is Professor of Work and Organisation at the Hertfordshire Business School, UK. He has a particular interest in exclusion and inequalities in the creative and cultural industries internationally and has published widely on work and employment in the film and television industries. In 2013 he co-established the interdisciplinary Creative Economy Research Centre (CERC) at the University of Hertfordshire with the aim of bringing together research interests in Business, Humanities and the Creative Arts. Dr Kate Hardy is a Lecturer in Work and Employment Relations at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include paid and unpaid work; gender; agency; the sex industry; materialist feminism; collective organising; political economy; the body; disability and theorising work and employment. Her work has been widely published academically and disseminated through radio and news media. She has co-authored a monograph with Teela Sanders, entitled ‘Flexible Workers: labour, regulation and the political economy of stripping industry’. Kate is committed to developing methodologies which work alongside research participants, in order to undertake socially and politically transformative research.Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of production in UK film and television (UKF&TV) is argued to exclude on the basis of gender, race and class. This article considers a social category that has been overlooked in these debates: disability. It argues that workers with impairments are ‘doubly disabled’ – in both the labour markets and labour processes of UKF&TV. It concludes that disability cannot simply be incorporated in an additive way in order to understand the exclusion of these workers, but that they face qualitatively different sources of disadvantage compared with other minorities in UKF&TV workplaces. This has negative implications for workers with impairments in other labour markets, as project and network-based freelance work, a contributor to disadvantage, is seen as both increasingly normative and paradigmatic.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio