People in the work force over the course of history have had to deal with unfair working conditions and often times little pay for their efforts. As civil and workers rights have been developed, there has been an upturn of employment in the modern world since this end of the Second World War. However, there has always been a marginalized group of individuals that have had a hard time earning a substantial living due to their hardships. Individuals with physical and intellectual disabilities have always had a hard time finding employment, whether it be due to their physical limitations or being discriminated against for their neurological uniqueness.
Being disabled has its difficulties. A disabled person has to overcome the challenges they face daily as it is a part of their life. It prevents them from being able to perform basic tasks at a basic level of ease or sometimes entirely. For someone that can’t walk, bathing or even getting out of bed can be very extraneous. Transportation is especially difficult for those of us who cannot see. Able-bodied people will never truly empathize with this difficulty unless they experience it for themselves. One concept that explains this well is the Spoon Theory coined by Christine Miserandino (Chapter 19, Beginning with Disability). Christine suffers from lupus, and she came up with a way of describing the impact of the illness on her life. She describes the feeling of having lupus as having a currency of energy to use each day that she must allocate sparingly and efficiently. Just performing everyday actions with a disability can be taxing and the feeling of emptiness can even spill over to the next day or throughout the rest of a week. I personally couldn’t begin to imagine the amount of attention to detail that is required to live a life like hers daily.
Figure 1- Spoon Theory (University of Greenwich, Cordina): A graphic, titled “How will I use my spoons today?”, depicting various everyday tasks and quantifying them as ‘x’ number of spoons.
The biggest misconception that able bodied people perceive is that disabled people are wholly incapable of being productive or useful. What’s was important for disabled people to be able to succeed at their endeavors is accessibility. This means implementing more ramps at institutions, more textbooks with brail, etc. “By the 1920s, however, deaf youth generally had access to all levels of education” (Burch & Nielsen 82). For example, as long as someone who is either deaf or blind can interpret the information being given to them they can perform the task required so long as they are still physically able to. Self-advocating organizations like ADAPT (Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) and SABE (Self Advocates Becoming Empowered) emphasized and fought for disability rights. One such policy was called “self-determination”. Self-determination was an idea that sought to accentuate the ability of disabled people to decide key factors in their lives. Where they lived, how they live, where the worked, etc. In 2003, major self-advocating organizations merged to promote the “full participation of people with developmental and mental disabilities in communities of their choosing” (Carey 102).
Figure 2 – Bureau of Labor Statistics: Colored drawing of two people in wheelchairs on opposite sides of a table working on computers.
These advancements in disability rights does not come without hardships. The jobless rate of people with disabilities continues to fluctuate even now. Some years the rate of unemployment among the disabled decreases considerably and increases in others. “The unemployment rate for persons with a disability, at 10.1 percent in 2021, decreased by 2.5 percentage points from the previous year but remains higher than in 2019 (7.3 percent)” (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022).
To truly see an overturn in the rate of employment for the disabled there needs to be a cultural paradigm shift in the direction of changing ableist perception. More people need to believe that a blind person can excel at mathematics, or a deaf person can give lectures in history. So much can be done that we haven’t realized yet, we just need to think deeper.
Written by Hakum Lartey
References:
Davis, Lennard J. Beginning with Disability: A Primer. Routledge, 2018.
Persons with a Disability: Labor Force Characteristics – 2021. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/disabl.pdf.
Leave a Reply