It has nothing to do with being “exempt.” The ADA mandates reasonable accommodations. It is intended to protect people who are otherwise 100% qualified to do the job. It does not require an employer to give a job to a person who is not qualified or* incapable* of doing that job, nor for whom unreasonable accommodation would be required.
So, for example, a deaf person cannot be a soldier in a US Army because they are incapable of performing the *required *functions. I have already given many examples of this.
Seriously? I’ve already covered this above. In the US, hiring a soldier is a lifelong commitment by the taxpayer. Soldiers get benefits above and beyond what is considered normal for a civilian employee. As I mentioned in my other post, Soldiers receive heathcare benefits, GI Bill, college tuition assistance, subsidized housing and commissary privileges, disability pay, many months of government-sponsored training that extends throughout their whole career, and scads of community and family assistance programs. I don’t know what country you live in, but in the United States hiring a soldier is VASTLY more expensive than hiring a civilian. This is why the military has been cutting unnecessary job fields left and right since the 80’s… To get us to the point where all noncombat jobs are done by civilians.
**Alessan **is Israeli - where there is at work the element of ***universal *service not just as a manpower-numbers source but as a fundamental of the society. So from their perspective the deaf or quadriplegic person doing what work s/he can do AND having it be recognized as being in service and on duty looks and sounds obvious. And when you already budget for nearly everyone to do their active tour and then decades in the reserves anyway, you might as well use everyone.
And yes, it’s true, the USA military as it has shrunk down has adopted the staff management model of a lot of US private enterprise: wherever you can do so without diminishing your effectiveness, use independent contractors for whose benefits you are not responsible.
It’s also a matter of not throwing away a potential asset. That deaf guy might have just teh right skills the army needs to win the war. Why throw him away?
It’s also, weirdly, an echo of pre-modern armies, with uniformed troops responsible for core military duties, and everything else farmed out to a mess of camp followers and mercenaries - or as they’re called today, “contractors”.
Historically, one could probably make an argument that the late 19th through 20th century scheme of having the military itself do a bunch of that work was a strange aberration.
And I bet it varies by service and by task; the Navy for example, will still need all the culinary-related rates, and for jr. enlisted guys to wash dishes and clothing, since it’s kind of hard to hire low-wage people to do that on a deployed ship for months at a time.
I suspect there’s probably a sort of division between in-garrison stuff and deployment related tasks. I mean, the USAF is probably always going to be able to hire locals to deal with the garbage and sewage at their airfields, but the USMC may not have that luxury when deployed, so there are probably marines who will deal with garbage and toilets, etc…
But the ultimate goal is to not have peacetime soldiers doing crap labor just because they’re where the shit lands at the bottom of the pyramid. The thinking is that they’re valuable as Soldiers/Sailors/Airmen/Marines (with the capital letters), and that they’ve enlisted for a reason, which was not to peel potatoes, make French Toast (unless they’re culinary specialists or something), buff linoleum floors or scrub toilets.
A few years ago, the Army changed their recruiting slogan to “an Army of One.” It was roundly criticized, and soon dropped, because of the dim view of elevating a single soldier as being very important, as opposed to the whole team being the basis of strength.
But aside from that issue, I’m still struggling to think of an example of a way in which a deaf person could bring their skills to bear as a uniformed service member, but not as a civilian or contractor. It sounds like you have some idea of what such a skill may be – help me out, what specifically are you thinking of? What unique skills would a deaf person need to be in uniform to contribute?
Okay, now I’m confused. We’re not “throwing him away.” I don’t know where you got that idea, because I don’t recall anyone EVER saying that disabled people get “thrown away.”
The US Army has literally thousands of positions for civilians to assist. They do everything from passing out equipment to intelligence. Heck, the intelligence community alone has thousands of positions divided among a dozen agencies. If a disabled person has a necessary skill, they can very easily find a place as a DA civilian, contractor, or another government agency. Even the examples you provided upthread (such as handing out uniforms or working an intel slot) are either partially or completely fulfilled by civilian personnel.
I don’t know if this is cross-cultural mistranslation or what, but your all-or-nothing thinking is a profound fallacy. Nobody here thinks that a deaf person worthless. They have AMPLE opportunity to contribute to the war effort in any number of ways.
What we are arguing against is this sort of Robert Heinlein idea that because someone can perform some function (no matter how marginal) they should be allowed to do so as a soldier. As I’ve already explained at length, the US Army is zero-sum. If I take a disabled soldier whose only task is handing out uniforms, that means I must subtract a fully-capable soldier from a non-negotiable combatant position. And trust me when I say the US Army is already being cut to the bone to make sure that all of those non-negotiable positions are covered by civilians.
If civilian contractors are just as good as uniformed service members, why have the latter at all? Just contract out everything, from infantrymen to pilots! It’s an absurd idea… as I’m sure you agree with me. That’s the thing, though: we all agree that you need men and women in uniform, and the only difference between us is that you think we need as few as possible, relatively speaking, and I think we need as many as possible.
Actual service members have a number of advantages over civilians, IMHO, even outside combat arms. For instance, when properly led they’re much more motivated and have greater espirit du corps. You can ask more of them, have them skip meals, work 20 hours as day if you need them to. After all, they’re not punching a clock. Similarly, you can only use contractors for what they’re contracted for, but soldiers have to do whatever you tell them to - an IT guy can fill sandbags, for instance, and a dishwasher can carry a stretcher. And of course, if a contractor screws up, all you can do is fire him and sue his boss. Soldiers, you can put in jail.
In short, contractors are useful if things go exactly according to plan. In the military, though, things never go according to plan. Call my naive, but when things go pear-shape, I’d rather put my trust in someone who swore an oath.
Oh, and as for disabled people… wasn’t the greatest naval battle in history won by a man with *two *separate major physical disabilities?
Yes, thanks for raising the strawman and having the courtesy to dismiss it right away.
There are things that service members can do that civilians and contractors cannot do. For example, kill people.
Civilians that work for the Department of Defense and the various support agencies are generally stratified: those that work 40 hours a week and punch out right at 5pm each day, and many who work very long hours and even weekends on a regular basis. For example, let’s take intelligence analysts at the National Security Agency and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Those are primarily (but not exclusively!) civilian agencies, though one is led by a general/flag officer and the other usually isn’t. If you think those people aren’t working their butts off, I’m not sure what to tell you.
Just a point of clarification here – are we on the same page when I talk about civilians and contractors? This comment implies that all civilians are contractors, and that’s incorrect.
I’m trying to get some specifics of what you think a hearing impaired military member can do that a civilian cannot do, and so far I’ve gotten: working harder, filling sand bags, and be trusted more. The odds that, say, an NGA analyst needs to fill sandbags is basically zero, and the idea that folks in uniform work harder and are more trustworthy than the average American is belied by the fact that in our large military, we often have dead-end fuckups who are worthless, just as with any other large institution.
Since the United States has ample experience with military and civilian employees working side-by-side on everything from being fine dining chefs to office administration to intelligence analysis, I am not aware that it is to our detriment to have civilians filling those positions.
Whether uniformed or civilian, each brings something a little different to their job, but I know of no magical qualities about a uniform in which you take one person off the street to do a job, and they would do it better as a general rule if they only had a rank.
But a different question for you: how much does a conscript in the IDF get in pay and benefits compared to the typical civilian?
You don’t seem to understand the difference between mandatory conscription and a volunteer army.
A volunteer army has to attract recruits. It doesn’t get an endless supply. People don’t want to dedicate their lives to a military life if what they’re getting out of it is digging latrines and peeling potatoes. Aside from the obvious appeals to patriotism and service, you attract them with things like promises of a fulfilling career, or useful job training for the civilian world, or good pay and benefits. Not 20 hour days of ditch digging.
So you offload those nonessential things to cheaper non-military contractors when possible, so that you can put your soldiers to better use (spent time training or learning instead of menial tasks), create a better environment for attracting the people you want to the service, and save money on all the pay and benefits you’d be giving enlistees to do menial jobs that civilians would do instead without the lifetime commitment.
Sure, if you’ve got mandatory service, and you need to find something for everyone to do, have them peel potatoes and dig ditches. But that’s not at all the situation that an all-volunteer army puts themselves in. You don’t seem to understand that massive fundamental difference.
Just to add to that – right now, roughly three-quarters of young people are not considered fit for military service in the U.S. Some of that is due to obesity, some to poor education, some to criminal backgrounds, and some to physical disabilities. It isn’t like hearing impaired people are being picked on – the armed forces simply don’t want most American kids.
I think maybe you’re thinking the degree of contractorization is a lot higher than it probably is. One of my closest friends spent part of 2007 and all of 2008 in sunny Baghdad as a signals officer, and for all intents and purposes, he was the head of a small handful of IT guys for his battalion. They didn’t contract that out.
However, the trash collection on the base was done by Filipino contractors, as was most of the food serving, etc…
I doubt that units in the field are served by contractor-run field kitchens either, nor are their vehicles refueled by contractor-driven fuel trucks.
Part of what Ravenman talks about isn’t so much that US teenagers and young people are somehow now more inherently unsuitable for enlistment, it’s that the military has force manpower targets that it shoots for, and one of the ways it tries to manage that is by tweaking the standards of inductees. Now that the Iraq war is over, and Afghanistan is winding down, the standards are rising- if they only need 60,000 new enlistees, they can afford to be more choosy than in say… 2006, when they’d take nearly anyone under 45 who could walk and chew gum at the same time.
The past restrictions were all defended as common sense at the time.
Which is not to say that the restriction against deaf people is reasonable or unreasonable. But “common sense” isn’t an argument. It’s usually just a statement of status quo bias.
My opinion is that this in some ways boils down to where you stand on Deaf Culture, and whether deafness is a disability or a social class.
No one deserves a spot in the military if they can’t hack it. It’s a functional force, not a national work program.
The military, as an institution, has a pretty bad track record of rationalizing why certain social classes should be excluded from service.
If you can’t run a certain distance in a certain time, you can’t be in the Army. Why do they discriminate against us out of shape couch potatoes? Shouldn’t they consider all we can offer? I mean, as long as we can offer it from an comfortable armchair?
The military is not a jobs program, it’s not a method for awarding participation trophies to kids with low self esteem. We only need a certain number of people in the military. If we need more people we might have to lower our standards to the point where we’re conscripting guys who can’t walk across the room without breathing heavily, for the sake of national survival. We’re not at that point, and maybe before we get to that point we might raise taxes a little bit to increase military pay to attract more volunteers who can actually fight? Or maybe our military is already too large and we should be reducing the numbers, in which case we only want the most qualified people. Which means if you can’t pass the basic physical standards you don’t get to join.
If the physical standards are bona fide standards, and aren’t just a pretext for excluding otherwise high performing people, then the physical standards are reasonable. Being able to hear spoken commands on the battlefield is not a pretextual standard, it is a bona fide standard.
If you’re deaf and want to join the military, it must be because you want to be a soldier. If you really want to be a cook, then why would you want to be a military cook? Being a cook in the military is something you want to do if you’ve been drafted and are looking for a job where you don’t get shot at. But we don’t have a draft, we don’t have universal service, and fulfilling a national service obligation is not considered a rite of passage into full-fledged citizenship in the United States. So there you go.
His biggest battle wasn’t so famous, but Half-man had three separate disabilities (hence the nick).
The founder of the Spanish legion was two for two, in part because his interventions in battle were more along the lines of “getting the local equivalent of a purple heart again” than “managing a huge battle”.
This guy didn’t just wear an eyepatch to look rakish.
All those are examples of people who got their wounds while already in service, but at the same time they’re proof that one doesn’t need to be “whole” to serve and serve well.
According to this site on deaf people in ww2, some of the sign language used by the deaf was taught to US troops so they could use it as a way of communicating silently.
Deaf people in WW2 served their country by doing war bonds and working in war related industries which back then was almost as important as the front.
I read where many deaf young men did do some drill and were prepared to fight if the need ever came.
Most of the dispute in this thread is about volunteer vs. conscription. In a volunteer military like the United States,’ there is no good reason to accept a deaf applicant unless she or he has some exceptional skill or ability to offer the military. The military could simply turn the deaf person down and accept any of many, able-bodied, healthy-eared applicants that are next in line.
This thread has me wondering: What about similar occupations such as paramedic, firefighter, or police officer? Do those jobs allow deaf people?
They do encourage those persons to learn some basic signs. For example, make like a gun with both hands, now put your thumbs together with your pointy fingers parallel. That sign for a police officer means “Show me your license”.
Yes. That is the problem. You don’t appear to acknowledge or comprehend the difference between the US and Israeli militaries. The US does not need or want as many soldiers as possible. The US is actively reducing the size of its military. The US is already kicking out soldiers who are experienced, fully qualified, and physically able, for no reason other than we are reducing endstrength. Since we want FEWER soldiers, rather than MORE, there is absolutely no reason to accept a candidate who does not meet the standard.
Two points here.
You are making the same fallacy as Alessan. I don’t recall anyone ever saying that a person who was not “whole” was just worthless. The Army already accepts people who are not in pristine condition. I myself required a medical waiver to join. The difference is that we are distinguishing between those who* can *complete all of the required tasks (like me) and those who cannot (deaf people).
The Army already retains soldiers who have these kinds of disabilities. There are infantrymen out there with one eye, and I know of some service members who have prosthetic legs. And you are quite correct. Their disabilities do not preclude them from performing required tasks, and even fighting in combat. So, as before, the Army is very carefully assessing disabled people and the choice to exclude deaf people is built on well-founded* necessity *and not just bigotry against the handicapped.
