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Notes -
Something else to consider: the rise of Work From Home, and particularly the trickle down of WFH to lower and lower level administrative roles. I'm seeing more and more secretarial kind of roles in WFH. To say nothing of help-line call center roles. Basically we're seeing more low or no skill WFH.
This works two ways.
Panglossian, people are good way: a lot of people who would have taken disability are able to find jobs that aren't painful or undignified for them. Just removing commuting is, for someone who can't really walk and/or drive, a huge advantage. Then figure you can set up your own home so much more easily to accommodate than a business can, and at no additional cost to anyone. Even small things like: imagine someone with a spinal injury who can't sit or stand for longer than one hour without laying down for five minutes. Such a person can't work any normal job, it's impossible. WFH, literally who cares or would even notice? So a lot of people who otherwise would have been forced to take disability, or would have tried to get disability rather than work in a way that was undignified. And they're happier as a result!
Cynical negative view: Social Security disability appeals function by the putative disabled person saying they can't work any job, the government trying to find a job they can work, and the disabled person appealing saying they can't work that job. When I worked on those appeals, our local office loved to tell everyone to become Parking Garage Attendants because it required no strength or skills and you could sit down all day. I don't even know how many parking garage attendants there are in our area! But now, they can use WFH positions, that might or might not even exist, and that gets around a lot of prior disability efforts. Can't walk to work or drive? No problem, stay home! It's a lot harder to be too disabled to work a home call center job than it was to be too disabled to work the same job in an office.
Random thoughts: This is a return to normal. The 20th century saw an excessive standardization of all work as office or factory work, i.e., external workplace work where employed and salaried workers work under direct supervision. Employers now realize that this needn't be universally enforced. You can in fact just hire people to do their job, let them handle the details, and judge them based on their effective output. It may take some bossware to make it function for jobs that rely more on putting-in-hours than on getting-things-done, but that's a fairly minor hurdle.
What was once the craftsman's workshop adjacent to his living quarters, the farmer living on his farm, the daytaler sleeping right next to tomorrow's task, is now the employee working from home. It's a revival of an older and universal theme that was briefly obscured by some of the excessive outgrowths of the industrial revolution.
Not to get all Marxist Econ-History-101 on it, but in large part the concept of disability is itself built around the capitalist conceit that the human worker is reducible to a standardized piece of machinery. And like all piece of factory equipment, a non-standard piece of machinery is best discarded, because one can't change factory procedures from standard.
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