Tuesday, April 11, 2006

'It's Hard Out Here For A Gimp', or 'Tell Me Something I Don't Know'

I don't like copying an entire article, but this needs reading.

Job hunt a challenge for disabled
Employers wary despite applicants' qualifications

By ELLEN SIMON
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ChartsNEW YORK -- Bruce Morgan knew he was in for a long job search.

Morgan has a strong résumé and a master's degree in business administration, but he also has cerebral palsy, which affects his speech. After his company, Nabisco, was bought by Kraft Foods Inc., his 25-person department was laid off on the same day in 2004.



Some of his colleagues planned to take time off. Morgan, a triathlete, piano player and father of three, started looking even before the layoff.

Over the next 19 months, he had 125 in-person meetings and sent a monthly e-mail update to 1,600 people. Sometimes he was merely discouraged; once he felt he was discriminated against so blatantly that he filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Near the end of his search, Morgan, who lives in Pompton Plains, N.J., was so disheartened, he started his own computer repair business.

The Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities, yet the employment rate for those with disabilities has been nearly flat for almost 20 years.

Only 34 percent of working-age people with disabilities had full-time or part-time jobs in 1986. In 2004, the figure was 35 percent, according to surveys done by the National Organization on Disability in conjunction with the Harris Survey. People without disabilities have an employment rate of 78 percent.

People with disabilities are nearly three times more likely to live in poverty than people without disabilities; 26 percent of people with disabilities had a 2004 annual household income below $15,000, versus 9 percent of those without disabilities, the survey found.

"Employers still have fears and misconceptions about people with disabilities," said Nancy Starnes, vice president and chief of staff at the National Organization on Disability, a non-profit focusing on the participation of people with disabilities in all aspects of community life.

Starnes, who has used a wheelchair since 1973, when a plane crash left her paraplegic, has made a career of trying to open doors for other people with disabilities.

"I heard a lot of very, very disheartened people who were trying to look for work," she said.

While their disabilities ranged widely, their message was the same. "They were asking, in some cases, pleading, 'Can't you help me try to get a job? I'm having a very difficult time finding an opportunity, finding an employer who will just give me a chance,' " she said.

Advocates for the disabled try everything to open doors, from events where college students with disabilities spend a day with an office worker to poetry contests.

"My mom without her job is like a baseball player without a bat. My mom with her job is like a cat lover with 20 cats," wrote Diamond Clark, age 12, whose mother works as a data entry clerk through New York City's FedCap, a non-profit that serves 3,000 people with disabilities a year with job training and placement.

People who train disabled workers not only have to find willing employers, they have to prepare their clients for a tough search.

Students who have spent their school years in special needs classes also have to adjust quickly to the less sheltered world of work.

Chef instructor Matthew Sywhaho teaches culinary students at FedCap's Career Design School. The students staged mock interviews with graduates of the program.

"Every time you go out, there's 400 people going out for the same job," Sywhaho told the students, who have severe learning disabilities. "What are you going to do to differentiate yourself from the other 399?"

"My No. 1 goal," he said later, "is to keep them from being scared, to keep them from being scared of new opportunities."

He gave them daily verbal tests and took them shopping for unfamiliar foods, such as white eggplant. For their graduation, the students prepared and served a seven-course lunch. Each new course was greeted with applause.

Between courses, Joann Kelly, whose son Terrell, 19, was in the class, said, "The job market is rough, but seeing what can be done, how far he has come, I believe he can prosper."

The students are still sheltered, said Robyn Saunders, a career placement specialist at FedCap. One received a job immediately after an interview, spent a day working in the kitchen and never returned. She now tries to place two graduates in the same kitchen so they aren't entirely surrounded by the unfamiliar. So far, her success rate is good; less than two months after graduation, six of the nine graduates have jobs.

Morgan, 44, eventually landed a job, too, after meeting a Deloitte & Touche partner at an awards lunch sponsored by Just One Break, a non-profit that helps find jobs for people with disabilities.

Morgan is now a tax manager at Deloitte & Touche in Parsippany, N.J.

Thinking back to his job search, he said, "I think sometimes people feel -- not at Deloitte, but at other jobs -- 'If someone handicapped can do the work that I do, what does that say about me?' "

We have been hearing a lot about discrimination of minorities, immigration and racism, lately, but nobody on the left talks about the biggest minority group of all - the disabled.

Gimps come from all ethnicities, religions and cultures, and yet we get little to no support from any activist community. Think it's hard being black? Try being black in a wheelchair. Think life is hard as a lesbian or gay man? Try being gay with CP or MS. Every problem you have? We have ten times more of it.

I live in California, am wheelchair bound and severely disabled. In Arizona, I had a $12 an hour tech support job and got promoted to Quality Monitoring. Then my wife got sick and became bed-ridden. She's a Canadian and doesn't qualify for benefits, so I had to quit the job, leave my life and move to a small town in California to be near family that could help me care for her. I can't get any decent job here, so have to live on SSI and SSD, which means I'm supporting myself and my housebound wife who gets no benefits or healthcare on $824 a month in California. But California gives you additional SSI - in most other states (like Az.) I would be getting about $500 a month to live on.

Luckily a friend moved out West to live with us and be my live-in aid, and her meager $1050 a month for caring for me allows us to live a little above the poverty line. But only just.

Think $1874 a month is enough to live on? Not in California, where our rent is $895 a month, bills run $500 a month (and more in summer), and we haven't even made it to food, medical costs and the like, yet. We get by, but only just, and one unexpected expense buries us for months.

Gimps are by far the most unemployed, the most below the poverty line and the most in need of healthcare. Are we blaming illegals for our woes, like Tancre(tin)do? No. It's the corporations and hiring managers who won't read the laws and educate themselves. I'm not going to be framing houses or washing my own toilets anytime soon. The only jobs most of us can get are tech jobs and those got shipped to India by the GOP Congress.

The same people who tell me that $824 a month is enough to live on. And if you make over $1500 a month, yourself (not counting your aid), you lose your aid or have to pay towards their salary, putting you right back into poverty and making it utterly pointless to even try working. Why work 40 hour weeks just to make the same amount of money you would staying home? And don't give them the 'lazy' argument or tell them to work for the 'satisfaction of doing it yourself'. Everything gimps do is ten times harder than it is for normals, so working ten times harder just to make the same, below-poverty living is a suicide waiting to happen.

Average Americans won't pick fruit or wash toilets just to live in poverty, so why should gimps bust their asses just to do the same? They keep the system so that you can't get off of it. You better enjoy poverty, because unless you're one of the lucky ones, you're never getting off the government system.

And yes, this is the same system the GOP want to cut because of 'welfare queens' and 'deadbeats'. They'll tell you that you aren't the problem, you can stay on the system, but they cut the rates across the board all the same.

This is why the rate of people considered 'very satisfied with life' is 34% for gimps.

Drive a mile in my wheelchair. Sit in the same seat 11+ hours a day (transportation times suck for us as we mostly rely on slow public transit), piss in a bag, don't have bowel movements, and explain to your supervisor that 'that smell' is the rashes and sores you get from doing this every single day just to live in poverty. Want to try it?

I didn't think so.

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