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And here is today's ZNet Commentary Delivery from Marta Russell.
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Why not Capitalism? By Marta Russell
Society still perceives disability as a medical matter. That is, society associates disability with physiological, anatomical, or mental "defects" and hold these conditions responsible for the disabled person's lack of full participation in the economic life of our society, rather than viewing their exclusion for what it is -- a matter of hard constructed socio-economic relations that impose isolation (and poverty) upon disabled people. This medicalization of disability places the focus on curing the so-called abnormality - the blindness, mobility impairment, deafness, mental or developmental condition - rather than constructing work environments where one can function with such impairments.
In my view, the economic system can be held primarily responsible for disabling physically and mentally impaired people. Disablement is a product of the political economy or the interaction between individuals (labor) and the means of production. In this view, disabled people's oppression can be traced to the restraints imposed by the capitalist system. Those who control the means of production in our economy impose "disability" upon those with bodies which have impairments perceived to cause functional differentials and as such, do not conform to the standard (more exploitable) worker's body.
Since passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, for example, business has fought, tooth and nail, integrating disability in the workplace by providing a reasonable accommodation as required by the ADA. In the first decade of the law, the disabled employment rate has not budged from its pre-civil rights figure of 70 percent unemployed. Capitalist business accounting practices can be held accountable.
Disabled persons are isolated and excluded from full participation in work life because business practices foster it. As I have written previously:
"The goal of business is to make profits. The basis of capitalist accumulation is the business use of surplus labor from the work force of skilled labor in a way which generates profits. Typical business accounting practices weigh the costs of employment against profits to be made. Productive labor, or exploitation of labor, means simply that labor is used to generate a surplus value based on what business can gain from the worker productivity against what it pays in wages, health care, and benefits (the standard costs of having an employee). The surplus-value created in production is then appropriated by the capitalist. The worker receives wages, which in theory, covers socially necessary labor, or what it takes to reproduce labor-power every working day.
The employer will resist any extra-ordinary or nonstandard operation cost.
From a business perspective, the hiring or retaining of a disabled employee represents nonstandard additional costs when calculated against a company's bottom line. [Economist, Richard] Epstein endorses this point of view, stating that employment provisions of the ADA are a "disguised subsidy" and that "successful enforcement under the guise of 'reasonable accommodation' necessarily impedes the operation and efficiency of firms."
Whether real or perceived in any given instance, employers continue to express concerns about increased costs in the form of providing reasonable accommodations, anticipate extra administration costs when hiring nonstandard workers, and speculate that a disabled employee may increase worker's compensation costs in the future. Employers, if they provide health care insurance at all, anticipate elevated premium costs for disabled workers. Insurance companies and managed care health networks often exempt "pre-existing" conditions from coverage or make other coverage exclusions based on chronic conditions, charging extremely high premiums for the person with a history of such health care needs. Employers, in turn, tend to look for ways to avoid providing coverage to cut costs. In addition, employers characteristically assume that they will encounter increased liability and lowered productivity from a disabled worker.
Prejudice-based disability discrimination, resting on employer assumptions that the disabled person cannot do the job or on employer-resistance to hiring a blind, deaf, mobility or otherwise impaired person just as they might not want to hire blacks or women, undoubtedly contributes significantly to the high unemployment rate of disabled people. Disabled workers also face inherent economic discrimination within the capitalist system, stemming from employers' expectations of encountering additional nonstandard production costs when hiring a disabled worker as opposed to hiring a worker with no need for special accommodation, environmental modifications, liability insurance, maximum health care coverage or even health care coverage at all.
Using this analysis, the prevailing rate of exploitation determines who is "disabled" and who is not. Disability thus represents a social construct which defines who is offered a job and who is not. An employee who is too costly (significantly disabled) will not likely become (or remain) an employee at all. Census data tends to support his view. For working-age persons with no disability the likelihood of having a job is 82.1 percent. For people with a non-severe disability, the rate is 76.9 percent; the rate drops to 26.1 percent for those with a significant disability." ["Backlash, the Political Economy, and Structural Exclusion," 21 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF EMPLOYMENT AND LABOR LAW (Feb. 2000) pp 348-349.]
The ADA has not "leveled the playing field" - the goal of most civil rights legislation - by eliminating economic discrimination.
In liberal capitalist economies, redistributionist laws which, if enforced, will cost business are necessarily in tension with business interests, which resist such cost-shifting burdens. This is evidenced by employers hard resistance to providing reasonable accommodations, the business-biased conservative courts which are consistently ruling on behalf of employers, not workers with impairments and the persistent high disabled unemployment rate.
Capitalists benefit by not having to employ or retain a worker with an impairment. Therefore many disabled workers are, and will continue to be, eliminated from mainstream economic activity. So the question becomes is it possible to reform business practices so that disabled persons are not excluded from the workforce?
Government could offer subsidies to offset business costs to level the playing field. Indeed it has recently passed one such reform, the Work Incentives Act, a subsidy that will allow disabled workers to retain their public health care by permitting them to buy into Medicare and Medicaid. But typical of most reforms, this measure falls way short. For example, the buy-in is only for an eight year stretch. What then?
Other dubious subsidies already exist. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 provides that federally-financed institutions are required to pay a "fair" or "commensurate" wage to disabled workers, but they are not required to meet even minimum wage standards. The traditional sheltered workshop is the prototype for justifying below-minimum wages for disabled people, based on the theory that such workers are not able to keep up with the average widget sorter. Any nonprofit employer is allowed to pay subminimum wage to disabled employees under federal law, if the employer can show that the disabled worker has "reduced productive capacity."
6,300 such U.S. workshops employ more than 391,000 disabled workers, some paying 20 to 30 percent of the minimum wage; as little as $3.26 an hour and $11 per week. In reality, workers with disabilities in these workshops know that they are sometimes paid less, not because they lack productive capacity but because of the nature of segregated employment.
Government could pay for disabled workers' reasonable accommodations. Perhaps that would remove the issue of that added cost from the employer's bottom line and stop some employers from fighting disabled employees' much needed accommodations in court.
Such reform, however, is not likely to make a difference in any substantive sense. For one, productivity is the center of capitalist accumulation. Labor is always, a priori, the retarding factor of productivity because labor can never produce fast enough or equivalently, at a low enough valued rate, to suit the expectation of an accelerating profit curve. It is likely that impaired persons (due to the reasons explained above) will always be seen as less than what is desirable to maximize profit. In addition, the put-into-practice theory of a natural unemployment rate assures that the Federal Reserve will see to it that large numbers of people are kept unemployed to preserve the "health" of the economy. Disabled persons are traditionally a part of this "reserve army of labor."
But it must also be recognized that workers with impairments in socialist countries also face isolation from the mainstream economic activities of their societies. Sheltered workshops for the blind existed under communism in Poland and they still do today under the new market regime there. Impairments are medicalized under socialism as in the U.S. under capitalism. All of the welfare states whether capitalist, communist or socialist, have wrongly deemed disabled people as medical defects "unable to work" and shifted them onto (in the U.S. below-poverty level) government subsistence programs or put them in paternalistic sheltered workshop environments. Being confined to living on abject poverty benefits is then called a "privilege." None have created modes of production where disabled persons can fully participate in the economic lives of their nations and provide for their families.
In the search for envisioning a just new economy, we must ask what is an economy for: to support market driven profits and outmoded models of production or to sustain social bonds and encourage full participation for all -- including those members of our society who have an impairment?
An economy is only working if it works for people, if it delivers health care, a living wage and a secure livelihood and income for every person. A government guarantee of full employment would require reorganizing the economy to allow everyone free choice among opportunities for useful, productive and fulfilling paid employment or self-employment. In order to bring more excluded persons into the workforce, it will be necessary to expand the work environment beyond the capitalist profit motive and ensure that federal and state governments act as the employers of last resort. Base compensation must be set at a living real wage below which no renumeration for disabled or nondisabled workers is allowed to fall.
Because illness (as separate from impairment) can make it impossible for some to work for pay with a reasonable accommodation or to sustain a job, those individuals must have a government entitlement to an adequate standard of living which rises with increases in the wealth and productivity of society.