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Comment by Suncho | Hacker News Reader

I found this article disturbing.

Why are we forcing developmentally disabled people -- or anyone, for that matter -- to get jobs? Is there a dire shortage of low-skilled labor that I'm not aware of?

"Whenever we talked about his employment prospects after the age of 21, we reminded Jamie that he did not want to live a life of watching YouTube, wrestling videos and Beatles Anthology DVDs in the basement."

Would there have been anything wrong with watching YouTube videos all day if Jamie's father had never told him that it was wrong?

And if the purpose of sheltered workshops is to provide busy work for developmentally disabled people, why should it matter whether they pay below minimum wage?

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We are not forcing people to get jobs. We are allowing them to get jobs if they wish.

Work has some stron benefits - social activity; economic activity; independance. These spread into health benefits (exercise, mental health resiliance) and also strongly reduce the risk of abuse.

Watching yourube videos all day is not what most people want to do. It would have been a problem for the person doing it, but also a problem for the people looking after him.

I really do not understand what point you're trying to make. This young man wants to be part of society. It's easy to say that his mental capacity is the problem, but perhaps it is our attitudes to his capacity that are the greater problem.

He might not ever be a marine biologist, but he could certainly help at aquariums.

For many years people have left people with learning disabilities to rot. Look at the mortality for people with LD we see unacceptably poor rates for things not connected to their LD, caused by things like doctors making excessive use of DNR for people with LD, or even just people not keeping dental hygiene up to date.

I'm trying to be polite here, and I want to ask a quesion hat I realise might sound very rude. Please, I am not attacking you. I am involved in work on stigma and I am genuinely curious. Do you feel as if your comment is stigmatising at all?

I did not intend my comment to be stigmatizing. But I do feel that one of the most degrading aspects of our society is the expectation that people have to earn a living by working at some kind of job. Especially in an economy where we're continually striving to save labor, employment is becoming an unrealistic expectation for lots of people, not just those with learning disabilities.

Personally, I do not have a job and I'm looking forward to a future in which more people have the freedom not to work without being shamed by their loved ones or by society.

Would you be happy sitting in the basement watching YouTube videos all day? Jamie is clearly happier working a job, he earns some money, the employer gets a job done, and somebody with a normal IQ is freed to do something more mentally demanding. Sounds like a quadruple win to me.

I'm sitting in my mom's attic as I type this. I pretty much sit here all day. And yes, I'm happy. Thanks for asking.

If Jamie is happier working a job, then fine. But was he born wanting to get a job? How much came from him and how much came from his parents placing unrealistic expectations on him?

Do you honestly believe that low-skilled workers are being kept from doing more mentally demanding work because they can't find anyone to take over their low-skilled jobs?

We're born wanting to suck on a nipple and afraid of falling and loud noises. More or less everything else is learned. And getting a job as, say, a grocery stacker doesn't seem exactly like an "unrealistic expectation" even for a kid with Downs.

Your strawman argument is irrelevant. Even assuming that the supply of jobs is fixed, which it isn't (lump of labor and all that), here are the choices:

a) overqualified person, here meaning somebody with an IQ of 100, works at a shit job and hates it; and person with Down's sits in basement watching YouTube all day and hates it, while society subsidizes his existence

b) person with Down's does a monotonous job and is happy with it; and neurotypical person is unemployed and can choose how he spends his days while society subsidizes his existence

I'd go for B, especially given that it gives the other person the chance to do something else useful. They may or may not actually do it, mind you, but at least there's a chance, while there really isn't in the other scenario.

You forgot c) where a person with down's is helped to find meaningful work that they enjoy, and they are not prevented from doing that work by discrimination or stigma and people put in place reasonable adjustments and other people put in place support. This means the person contributes, and their relatives are freed up to contribute. What about the other guy? Fuck that other guy, they can look after themselves.

Low-skilled work is a poverty trap that drains people of energy they might otherwise be using to learn more valuable skills. In fact, it's an anecdote not uncommon that more high school graduates are going to college because filling out FAFSA forms has a greater expected payout than a job search for part-time fast-food wages.

Perhaps the GP didn't get the causality quite right, but we are entering some kind of a dystopian twilight zone with regard to employment. Not too long ago, there was the story about a Walmart opening up in the D.C. area, and that one single store received __25,000__ job applications. That's a lower acceptance rate than Harvard, getting a job at Walmart is literally more cut-throat than getting into Harvard.

This whole discussion, both in the article and in the comments, comes from a perspective that the only options are doing something that pays, and sitting around doing nothing. And sadly that may be the case, but it doesn't have to be that way. The United States today suffers from a severe lack of social connectedness (see Bowling Alone, etc) that could easily be improved by paying unemployed people, including the disabled, to do activities as simple as: hang out with old people who live alone, read a book to a group of little kids. PLAY with little kids. Help someone in poor health walk to the grocery store once a week. There are so many positive activities that would contribute to a better society and they don't happen because the whole concept of the government spending money to improve society has been successfully stigmatized. I won't go ranting about why.

I think the purpose of giving disabled people the opportunity to work has more to do with socialization and fulfillment than some sort of adherence to rules around being "productive members of society".

If you're happy sitting in your basement watching youtube, that's (maybe? probably not really?) okay, but a lot of people would get bored and restless doing that all day.

I mean, yeah, our society is in need of an overhaul in terms of how we value work (especially menial work), but you can't ignore the fact that most of us have something built-in that desires to do something. And right now society isn't structured in such a way that we can[1] provide a more valuable something for disabled people to do, so low-skilled labor will have to do for now.

[1] - I mean, we can, but it's probably not going to happen in a society where we have trouble getting people to even support basic welfare & healthcare for their fellow human beings.

Because it's important to feel like you're important. Not having a job, especially being turned down for jobs, can make you feel worthless and unnecessary. It's a terrible place to be.

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