Marta Russell
Society
still perceives disability as a medical matter. That is, society associates
disability with physiological, anatomical, or mental “defects” and hold
these conditions responsible for the disabled person’s lack of full
participation in the economic life of our society, rather than viewing their
exclusion for what it is — a matter of hard constructed socio-economic
relations that impose isolation (and poverty) upon disabled people. This
medicalization of disability places the focus on curing the so-called
abnormality – the blindness, mobility impairment, deafness, mental or
developmental condition – rather than constructing work environments where one
can function with such impairments.
In
my view, the economic system can be held primarily responsible for disabling
physically and mentally impaired people. Disablement is a product of the
political economy or the interaction between individuals (labor) and the means
of production. In this view, disabled people’s oppression can be traced to the
restraints imposed by the capitalist system. Those who control the means of
production in our economy impose “disability” upon those with bodies which
have impairments perceived to cause functional differentials and as such, do not
conform to the standard (more exploitable) worker’s body.
Since
passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, for example, business
has fought, tooth and nail, integrating disability in the workplace by providing
a reasonable accommodation as required by the ADA. In the first decade of the
law, the disabled employment rate has not budged from its pre-civil rights
figure of 70 percent unemployed. Capitalist business accounting practices can be
held accountable.
Disabled
persons are isolated and excluded from full participation in work life because
business practices foster it. As I have written previously:
“The
goal of business is to make profits. The basis of capitalist accumulation is the
business use of surplus labor from the work force of skilled labor in a way
which generates profits. Typical business accounting practices weigh the costs
of employment against profits to be made. Productive labor, or exploitation of
labor, means simply that labor is used to generate a surplus value based on what
business can gain from the worker productivity against what it pays in wages,
health care, and benefits (the standard costs of having an employee). The
surplus-value created in production is then appropriated by the capitalist. The
worker receives wages, which in theory, covers socially necessary labor, or what
it takes to reproduce labor-power every working day.
The
employer will resist any extra-ordinary or nonstandard operation cost. From a
business perspective, the hiring or retaining of a disabled employee represents
nonstandard additional costs when calculated against a company’s bottom line.
[Economist, Richard] Epstein endorses this point of view, stating that
employment provisions of the ADA are a “disguised subsidy” and that
“successful enforcement under the guise of ‘reasonable accommodation’
necessarily impedes the operation and efficiency of firms.”
Whether
real or perceived in any given instance, employers continue to express concerns
about increased costs in the form of providing reasonable accommodations,
anticipate extra administration costs when hiring nonstandard workers, and
speculate that a disabled employee may increase worker’s compensation costs in
the future. Employers, if they provide health care insurance at all, anticipate
elevated premium costs for disabled workers. Insurance companies and managed
care health networks often exempt “pre-existing” conditions from coverage or
make other coverage exclusions based on chronic conditions, charging extremely
high premiums for the person with a history of such health care needs.
Employers, in turn, tend to look for ways to avoid providing coverage to cut
costs. In addition, employers characteristically assume that they will encounter
increased liability and lowered productivity from a disabled worker.
Prejudice-based
disability discrimination, resting on employer assumptions that the disabled
person cannot do the job or on employer-resistance to hiring a blind, deaf,
mobility or otherwise impaired person just as they might not want to hire blacks
or women, undoubtedly contributes significantly to the high unemployment rate of
disabled people. Disabled workers also face inherent economic discrimination
within the capitalist system, stemming from employers’ expectations of
encountering additional nonstandard production costs when hiring a disabled
worker as opposed to hiring a worker with no need for special accommodation,
environmental modifications, liability insurance, maximum health care coverage
or even health care coverage at all.
Using
this analysis, the prevailing rate of exploitation determines who is
"disabled" and who is not. Disability thus represents a social
construct which defines who is offered a job and who is not. An employee who is
too costly (significantly disabled) will not likely become (or remain) an
employee at all. Census data tends to support his view. For working-age persons
with no disability the likelihood of having a job is 82.1 percent. For people
with a non-severe disability, the rate is 76.9 percent; the rate drops to 26.1
percent for those with a significant disability.” [“Backlash, the Political
Economy, and Structural Exclusion,” 21 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF EMPLOYMENT AND
LABOR LAW (Feb. 2000) pp 348-349.]
The
ADA has not “leveled the playing field” – the goal of most civil rights
legislation – by eliminating economic discrimination.
In
liberal capitalist economies, redistributionist laws which, if enforced, will
cost business are necessarily in tension with business interests, which resist
such cost-shifting burdens. This is evidenced by employers hard resistance to
providing reasonable accommodations, the business-biased conservative courts
which are consistently ruling on behalf of employers, not workers with
impairments and the persistent high disabled unemployment rate.
Capitalists
benefit by not having to employ or retain a worker with an impairment. Therefore
many disabled workers are, and will continue to be, eliminated from mainstream
economic activity. So the question becomes is it possible to reform business
practices so that disabled persons are not excluded from the workforce?
Government
could offer subsidies to offset business costs to level the playing field.
Indeed it has recently passed one such reform, the Work Incentives Act, a
subsidy that will allow disabled workers to retain their public health care by
permitting them to buy into Medicare and Medicaid. But typical of most reforms,
this measure falls way short. For example, the buy-in is only for an eight year
stretch. What then?
Other
dubious subsidies already exist. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
provides that federally-financed institutions are required to pay a
"fair" or “commensurate” wage to disabled workers, but they are
not required to meet even minimum wage standards. The traditional sheltered
workshop is the prototype for justifying below-minimum wages for disabled
people, based on the theory that such workers are not able to keep up with the
average widget sorter. Any nonprofit employer is allowed to pay subminimum wage
to disabled employees under federal law, if the employer can show that the
disabled worker has "reduced productive capacity."
6,300
such U.S. workshops employ more than 391,000 disabled workers, some paying 20 to
30 percent of the minimum wage; as little as $3.26 an hour and $11 per week. In
reality, workers with disabilities in these workshops know that they are
sometimes paid less, not because they lack productive capacity but because of
the nature of segregated employment.
Government
could pay for disabled workers’ reasonable accommodations. Perhaps that would
remove the issue of that added cost from the employer’s bottom line and stop
some employers from fighting disabled employees’ much needed accommodations in
court.
Such
reform, however, is not likely to make a difference in any substantive sense.
For one, productivity is the center of capitalist accumulation. Labor is always,
a priori, the retarding factor of productivity because labor can never produce
fast enough or equivalently, at a low enough valued rate, to suit the
expectation of an accelerating profit curve. It is likely that impaired persons
(due to the reasons explained above) will always be seen as less than what is
desirable to maximize profit. In addition, the put-into-practice theory of a
natural unemployment rate assures that the Federal Reserve will see to it that
large numbers of people are kept unemployed to preserve the “health” of the
economy. Disabled persons are traditionally a part of this “reserve army of
labor.”
But
it must also be recognized that workers with impairments in socialist countries
also face isolation from the mainstream economic activities of their societies.
Sheltered workshops for the blind existed under communism in Poland and they
still do today under the new market regime there. Impairments are medicalized
under socialism as in the U.S. under capitalism. All of the welfare states
whether capitalist, communist or socialist, have wrongly deemed disabled people
as medical defects “unable to work” and shifted them onto (in the U.S.
below-poverty level) government subsistence programs or put them in
paternalistic sheltered workshop environments. Being confined to living on
abject poverty benefits is then called a “privilege.” None have created
modes of production where disabled persons can fully participate in the economic
lives of their nations and provide for their families.
In
the search for envisioning a just new economy, we must ask what is an economy
for: to support market driven profits and outmoded models of production or to
sustain social bonds and encourage full participation for all — including those
members of our society who have an impairment?
An
economy is only working if it works for people, if it delivers health care, a
living wage and a secure livelihood and income for every person. A government
guarantee of full employment would require reorganizing the economy to allow
everyone free choice among opportunities for useful, productive and fulfilling
paid employment or self-employment. In order to bring more excluded persons into
the workforce, it will be necessary to expand the work environment beyond the
capitalist profit motive and ensure that federal and state governments act as
the employers of last resort. Base compensation must be set at a living real
wage below which no renumeration for disabled or nondisabled workers is allowed
to fall.
Because
illness (as separate from impairment) can make it impossible for some to work
for pay with a reasonable accommodation or to sustain a job, those individuals
must have a government entitlement to an adequate standard of living which rises
with increases in the wealth and productivity of society.