As Lou Brown’s recent longitudinal study(1) of employment showed us late last year, we have known for more than 30 years the critical variables needed to employ the most impaired people among us.
We have known for the bulk of that time how to assist those most vulnerable to not only have a job, but also to have careers, become taxpayers and be included in typical lives – maybe not exceptional, but ordinary lives.(2)
If I were addressing you in 1972, I could be excited to tell you about all of what is possible via what Marc Gold(3) and other early pioneers were teaching us. But it is not 1972. It is 35 years later and we are still in the sad situation of having mostly unemployed adults with impairments in our communities.
If the myth we address today was merely revealed via the science of employment assistance – how to get people with labels that others stereotype into unemployment – then our “local Lou Brown” - Phil Tuckerman’s 30 years of demonstrated success would be all we need to hear.
But we have a feeling that the myth is a bit bigger than the science of employment. It goes to the heart of what Wills refer to as the will. He suggests we have to have will before we will ever apply the skill.
This is simple, yet profound, because it reveals the awful truth of why people with significant impairments aren’t employed if we have had over 35 years of developing and fine tuning the skill. The awful truth is that we don’t yet have the WILL to make it happen.(4)
As a nation we seemed to have the will in 1986 but have long since dropped that ball.(5)
As organisations, we seem to have the sad belief that only the easy to employ are employable. At least our act validity(6) tells us that this is so. We act in ways to reinforce our government’s, department’s and citizen’s beliefs. While the economy booms we leave the least vulnerable out of the good life. Isn’t this a will issue?
As individual parents and advocates, we accept segregation as though it has validity. At least looking at the numbers of people still segregated, this must be the case.
Will we, like the environment, wait until the atmosphere is so poisoned and the planet so hot before we have a conversation about real changes, personal changes, government changes or can we begin that real conversation now?
Endnotes
- Brown, L., Shiraga, S, & Kessler, K. (2006). The Quest for Ordinary Lives: The Integrated Post-School Vocational Functioning of 50 Workers With Significant Disabilities. Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities (RPSD), 31, 2, 93-121
- Cain, P. (2005). The Knowledge of Assisting People with Intellectual Disability to Participate in Employment. Interaction, 18, 3. 8-23.
- Gold, M. W. (1972). Stimulus Factors in Skill Training of the Retarded on a Complex Assembly Task Acquisition Transfer and Retention. American Journal of Mental Deficiency, 76, 517-526.
- “It is no longer 1980, or even 1990. We would have hoped the field would have been further along, much further along, in the successful placement and retention of young people whatever their level and type of disability.” Wehman, P. (2006). Invited Commentary. Integrated Employment: If Not Now, When? If Not Us, Who? Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities (RPSD), 31, 2, 122-126.
- Disability Services Act 1986.
- Evidenced by our actions rather than our stated values or beliefs.
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