What is a disability exactly? The answer is inexact since disability isn’t a physical matter. Its an economic idea, the term put into currency by Karl Marx to designate laborers who, owing to misfortune, were no longer able to work in factories. Disability is therefore a 19th century term. And today Karl Marx haunts every disabled person like one of Scrooge’s ghosts—“you shall work no more; work no more….”
We don’t acknowledge the economic origins of the term, preferring to imagine disability is a medical circumstance. Legislatiion is written to reflect this view. But disability is not a physical problem. Its still an economic idea. Give disabled people proper work place accommodations and most can work.
The numbers are terrible. 70% of the disabled remain unemployed in the US. This is a failure of imagination. Its the 19th century.
I think its worse than that. I think its national cynicism. “We don’t need to hire these people; they might be expensive; besides the government looks after them, doesn’t it?” I believe when we use the term “corporate welfare” we should always add the word disability.
Disability corporate welfare means that no one in business should ever be inconvenienced by having to think about hiring the disabled. The government will look after the lame and the halt.
Last year National Public Radio and Planet Money aired reports about social security disability fraud. The reporting was discredited but the narrative reflected the struggles of blue collar workers claiming disability because they could no longer lift boxes. Ira Glass missed the point: without accommodations disability becomes an economic term. The workers with slipped disks and carpal tunnel are in need of work place reassignment. But we don’t do this in America. In this way the HR people are Marxists, irnocally enough. “We’ll let the government handle this.” Workaday America doesn’t believe in accommodaions.
How we manage accommodations and universal design will reflect just how eager we are to be a 21st century nation.
Planet of the Blind 