Reports
IHOOPS target ATOS again!
At 8.30am on Friday the 29th July, armed with a cardboard coffin (‘ATOS Kills’), megaphone, and leaflets for passersby, Islington Hands Off Our Public Services demonstrated the opposition to ATOS once again.
ATOS Origin is a French IT firm which, since 2008, has been making money from assessing whether disabled people are ‘fit for work’. Their real purpose seems to be to strip benefits from as many people as they can. The assessments can be as short as 20 minutes, and notes from GPs are ignored in favour of what the ATOS software decides.
Since 2008, 400,000 people have taken the decision to cut their benefits to appeal, and around 40% have the decision overturned (in some areas the number is as high as 70%). ATOS are set to cut their spending by making further ‘efficiencies’ - even more injustice is on the horizon.
ATOS’s role is inhumane, unnecessary and ideologically driven. Claimants are made to feel like scroungers, like criminals. One young man explained that his assessment had made him feel like his disability was “unacceptable in their eyes, that [he] was of no value of society”.
We must highlight and fight this injustice at every stage.
- Posted by: luciekinchin at 3:56pm on 29 July 2011
- Website: www.ihoops.org.uk/
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