There is a local charity that offers jobs to the severly disabled.
Most draw disability or SSI checks and any significant income would get that shut off.
The charity offers simple “make work” jobs that gives these people an activity for a few hours. It’s something they look forward to and gets them out of the house.
They do pay a small hourly wage but nothing near minimum wage.
Requiring minimum wage would end this program. The charity doesn’t have the money and the simple keychains & trinkets they make & sell would never pay the wages.
This. I have a family member who is mentally disabled and this is the type of work that he performs each day. He is as proud of that job as any poster in this thread. He takes his $50 paycheck at the end of the week and buys his favorite candies or sodas. It gives him a sense of pride that he is contributing.
I have mentioned in various threads around here that my wife works in this industry. She started out working for a local company as a job coach. Her assignment was supervising at group of people at a local pharmaceuticals R&D company that would get some kind of tax break for employing “D&H” adults. Her team was originally a group of four who worked 8-hour days four days a week, and then did “community activities” on Fridays. On Monday through Thursday her predecessor had them in an out-of-the-way office and had them learning to read, playing simple games of Hang-Man on a whiteboard, and doing simple math exercises. But that woman was going off to grad school and my wife was hired to take over the team.
My wife saw that the team members were bored with the “work” and didn’t get much respect (particularly one of them who, like SPS49SD noted, had a habit of dashing off to the restroom for long periods) so she contacted the HR liaison for the company and asked for real work. The team was given the job of collating papers and creating New Hire packets for the HR department and soon began to take pride in their work – even the team members’ parents started to boast in the community that their special children were doing clerical work for the HR department of the pharmaceutical company. By the time my wife changed jobs, the team had grown from 4 to 10 members and was creating informational packets for several departments.
My wife’s closest colleague was a Time Study Consultant. Every day she would go to two different companies with her stopwatch and watch a special employee perform whatever tasks they were routinely expected to do, then watch a randomly selected veteran/average employee do the same task. Then she’d write reports to recommend a Special Wage for the next six months. These were not (sub)minimum wages. These were the equivalent percentage of the going established labor rate (which occasionally actually equaled minimum wage).
I was quite surprised to learn that the branch manager of my wife’s company was a far-right conservative. I asked what she thought of working for a tax-transfer business and she countered that it wasn’t an income redistribution (welfare) program; it was non-profit company using grants and charitable donations to coordinate the employment of individuals who were eager to work. She acknowledged that their paychecks might be small but noted that they paid income taxes like anyone else every time a payroll check was cut - and that was better than having them hidden away and simply sucking up welfare dollars.
My wife’s next role within the company was to coordinate the placement and periodic evaluation of special people in jobs that were available. She, too, encountered employees who wanted to work more hours or do more demanding jobs. Part of my wife’s role was to convene with employers, job coaches, state and local employment regulation experts, medical experts, and special parents to figure out how to address the special employee’s desires to increase their participation – these people were eager to work ‘like normal people’ if at all possible. In many cases, the special employee’s desire was simply a result of overestimating his/her capability; in some, the employer really didn’t have more work or additional tasks to assign; only in a few rare cases did the regulation experts note that the special employee would be overqualified for the program if he/she demonstrated an ability to work a 40-hour week at full output*. The people who were encouraging the participants to ‘game the system’ were the state representatives.
–G!
*e.g. “Sure, you’re capable of working 32 hours a week at reduced output with a job coach and a community day and supervision to keep you on-task. But if you were working 40 hours a week at full output, you’d be considered a normal employee. That sounds great, but normal employees don’t get job coaches, community days, or supervisors to keep you on-task and we’re pretty sure (because we’ve seen it occur in the past) that you’d get exhausted and distracted and eventually lose your job.” And the couple of special employees who insisted they really could handle ‘real work’ conditions eventually got exhausted and distracted and lost their jobs. Then they came back to the program to get help with placement in a different job.
Thanks for the thoughtful post, Grestarian. I’d appreciate more info, if you please, to dispel my ignorance. I’m posting primarily to further discussion and obtain information - and I believe I am open to the possibility of changing my views. I’m drafting a message board post - not a thesis.
Part of my confusion concerns whether efforts such as you describe are best viewed as actual gainful employment as opposed to social services. In actuality, I suppose they vary somewhere along a continuum. To some extent, I support the expenditure of resources towards allowing impaired individuals to lead a somewhat enriched existence. Of course, the issue of cost needs to be considered. Is it inappropriate for me to observe that persons performing low-level competitive employment might appreciate efforts to enrich THEIR lives as well?
How are the associated costs accounted. How much do "a job coach and a community day and supervision to keep you on-task cost compared to the employee’s production? How does a for-profit company justify such expenditures? Are they offset by taxbreaks, reduced wages (as discussed in this thread), a company’s commitment to social action…? How are employees receiving such assistance and with lower production treated compared to other employees in terms of promotion and benefits?
Like I said, I’m interested in learning more. As I go about my life, I most commonly encounter “special” employees at the grocery store where - to tell the truth - the majority of them do a pretty crappy job of bagging my groceries. Another instance was a cow-orker - an attorney who was blind (and a racial minority to boot.) He was a decent enough guy, and I cannot imagine the difficulty of attempting to be a lawyer when blind. But as a cow-orker, essentially competing for job assignments, promotions, and such, it sorta bothered me that he was - by any measure - a pretty crappy attorney. And an expensive one to boot - with his dog, his reader, speech technology, etc. Yet he was promoted rapidly, and was put to the forefront as a sign of our shop’s enlightened employment practices.
My understanding is that employers typically don’t provide the job coach, just as employers typically don’t provide service animals. There are some situations where the employment is as much therapy as it is productive work. Those situations usually involve working for a non-profit (like Industries for the Blind and visually impaired) which may provide coaches itself.
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There used to be a Wendy’s not far from my apartment that employed a young man with Down’s Syndrome. All he did was clean up the restaurant - clearing and wiping the tables, emptying the trash and occasionally cleaning the window glass.
From what I could see, he was the most competent employee in the entire place within his limited sphere of responsibility.
Note that it’s my wife who works in that industry, not me, and I’ve also been a bit vague to make sure I’m not stepping across any privacy boundaries. Nevertheless, I’m happy to provide what info I can and I’ll play along and speculate with you, as well.
Yeah, my apologies about that last part. I suspect around these boards my moniker is synonymous with “Exceedingly Verbose Posts” or that’s the translation of my name from Tralfamadorian…
I would concur with that supposition.
I’ve boasted around here that I lean so far left that I’ve fallen over. However, even if I was leaning the other way, I think there’s been enough of a benefit back to the employing companies to have encouraged expansion of the program(s) and participant roster and the concept (if not a whole program and/or its administrative company/organization expanding) to other regions. And I think the coordinating entities have put in enough monitoring, rules, and safeguards to keep the Special Employees from being exploited. I doubt those protocols were developed hastily out of thin air and I doubt they exist purely for the employees’ benefit. Exploitation of the employees through such programs would generate enough bad press to get such programs squashed very quickly.
There’s nothing wrong with enriching the Special Employees lives as well [I’m not implying you suggested that]. However, in discussions with my wife about various cases, it has become clear to me that the programs also benefit the Special employee’s other family members by allowing them to turn their attention beyond that Special individual – to their own educational, employment, social, whatever needs. Also, as I mentioned some Special parents boasting about their Special child’s employment, I’ll note that there have even been cases where Special parents have threatened to take legal action in response to suggestions of rotating their Special child to another participating employer. To be fair, though, there have also been Special employees who have really NOT been ready to handle the responsibility of being employed. Some couldn’t handle being away from home for extended periods, some couldn’t focus on the job (or refrain from bringing toys to work), and some just didn’t have marketable skills even when they really wanted to work.
Another aspect to consider is the fact* that this country# places a heavy value on people contributing to the overall society/community via work: One demonstrated his/her faith by working/God showed he was pleased by making that person rich. With that value pervading the dominant groups as this nation evolved it’s no wonder that a lot of people learn(ed) to define themselves by their work and job title, to the extent that one could easily imagine that a “normal person’s” typical life path is to grow up, go to school, then graduate, then go to work. The people with Downs and other mental/physical disabilities are not completely detached from society; they receive the same value messages from media, too. So once they are done with school they may feel it’s the ‘right thing to do’ to try to do some kind of work, if they are capable of doing so in any way.
I suspect the specifics may vary from state to state, possibly between counties or regions. I’m also going to make a leap-of-discourse and assume you’re asking less about the costs as about who pays for the various facets of the overall cost. To that I would say it’s a combination of non-profit organizations coordinating the job coaches and supervisors and community days and the employing companies paying the actual wages.
In addition to getting some kind of tax break for participating in the program (it’s probably considered a donation to charity or a public service), the assignments (as described to me by my wife) seem to be tasks that are low priority and/or low urgency necessities of a relatively simple nature. One company had people come in and fill parts bags for educational soldering kits: Take one part from each bin, put it in the bag, put the bag over with the other bags. One highly-regarded (for this area) restaurant% had people rolling silverware into napkins: take one shiny tool from each bin, roll it into the cloth, stack 'em over there.$ One company had people picking up garbage around the property (it was a golf course; huge property).
We have another thread running today (2019 Mar 08) where people are describing the jobs they held for especially short times. The majority of the tales I’ve seen could be summarized as “it was so mind-numbingly boring that I couldn’t do it any more.” and a lot of the jobs I’ve described above are of that nature: They are not physically or mentally challenging, they are not hazardous or even unsanitary, they are often repetitious, they gotta be done by somebody. Some companies have enough of a workload in this category that the work could be assigned to someone with Special Needs who would find it challenging, interesting, and fulfilling.
Yes, yes (see above), yes, and in the case of the pharmaceutical company, there’s seems to be some insider knowledge about the program. By that I mean there is a growing body of research finding correlation between mental genius and offspring who have mental problems – some preliminary geographical analysis has seen a rise in Asperger <-> Autism spectrum disorder cases around the northern central coast of California – Silicon Valley. The theories being kicked around are that there are people with the genius to think in the highly technical and abstract ways that have made the Internet a real thing and made GPS technology employ Einstein-Rosen Separability have a real meaning in practical every day life and those people are now getting together and having children who, like Einstein, have difficulty with every-day Newtonian physics but, unlike Einstein, aren’t moving past that to propose better paradigms like Relativity.
The impression my wife gave me was that the Special employees were happy to be contributing to society and working what they perceived to be normal jobs but there were no role promotions.
I never asked my wife about work benefits but I would speculate that they either didn’t have life/vision/dental/etc coverage because they were covered under other Special Needs programs or they were allotted company benefits at some sort of pro-rate – put in X hours get Y sick days and the fact that you work 32 instead of 40 hours a week is conveniently overlooked. It was known that the pharma company had its own cafeteria and that employees paid $1 for absolutely anything they put on their tray; the Special Needs people got the same cafeteria discount as the regular employees.
I have to heartily agree with you there. My wife now insists on bagging her own vegetables and I have a tendency to reorganize and consolidate bags while I’m moving them from the cart to the trunk of the car.
Yes, I suppose a company gets some good PR when proudly demonstrating its dedication to encouraging Special Needs inclusivity. That could conceivably be filed under the justification-of-expenditure question, above.
–G!
I don’t necessarily like this fact, but it is largely inescapable, most especially in America where much fanfare and credit is (unduly) steeped upon this heritage near the end of every year.
Many other countries do, as well.
% While my wife and I have not avoided this restaurant, we have never ordered anything on the menu that requires silverware to eat.
Yes, yes (see above), yes, and in the case of the pharmaceutical company, there’s seems to be some insider knowledge about the program. By that I mean there is a growing body of research finding correlation between mental genius and offspring who have mental problems – some preliminary geographical analysis has seen a rise in Asperger <-> Autism spectrum disorder cases around the northern central coast of California – Silicon Valley. The theories being kicked around are that there are people with the genius to think in the highly technical and abstract ways that have made the Internet a real thing and made GPS technology employ Einstein-Rosen Separability have a real meaning in practical every day life and those people are now getting together and having children who, like Einstein, have difficulty with every-day Newtonian physics but, unlike Einstein, aren’t moving past that to propose better paradigms like Relativity.
My point was that these geniuses at the pharmaceutical and other super-high-tech companies have been getting together and having Special Needs kids@ and, having learned about programs that help such persons find meaningful employment, have encouraged their own employers to participate in such programs.
–G!
@ This is not to suggest this is the only source of such individuals