Hurting by Helping and the Great Emu War

I recently ran across an interesting article here, which talks about the move to be inclusive by mandating all jobs, even those filled by persons with severe handicaps, get paid at least minimum wage. On the surface, this would seem like an issue of dignity, to make sure everyone is paid a fair wage. No one wants to look like the bad guy for not paying a severely disabled adult a fair wage-inclusion, fairness, human dignity, and all that. 

Basically, what is at issue though is not so much one of fairness to the individual as it is practicality to the disabled community as a whole. In an ideal world where every business is swimming in disposal payroll cash, then in theory everyone can pay everyone a living wage. I am all for trying to make life for the disabled as fair a playing field as possible. I have a cousin who has some developmental delay issues, and struggled for a long time both in school and in his quest to become a functional adult. I also have a very good friend from my undergraduate days that is total deaf, as is his wife. While an otherwise totally functional and extremely intelligent adult, he struggled to find jobs because the minute he would apply (and the application form makes you list any know disabilities and needed reasonable accommodations), as he says, "it becomes ghost city," as most businesses never even call him for an interview-this, even though the man has more than one advanced degree. 

 So, I am certainly sympathetic to the plight of people with disabilities because I have seen the ongoing shaft they get by working society in general. In theory, companies are not supposed to discriminate on things like that, but, they do. They don't call it that publicly, but there are a million ways around anti-discrimination laws. Let's be honest, if you don't want to hire someone, you can find a legitimate reason to "move in another direction." A person might not want to hire the person because they are deaf or gay or whatever, but the official reason, if they even give one, is usually something banal like "we don't think you would be a fit with our corporate mission" or "we've hired someone more qualified" or some such HR claptrap. Unless you openly say in the interview process, "We are not hiring you because of your skin color" or whatever, it's really hard to prove in court. Not impossible, but unless you have your own personal employment civil rights attorney on retainer, it's not likely. As 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck...well, let's just say more attorneys don't work pro bono.  

But, I also understand the other side of this equation as well. I have managed a small business. I come from a long line of self-employed and self-made men. I understand the cutthroat nature of the business world. You have to make payroll. You have to pay for unexpected machine failures. You are just trying to make a living in a dog eat dog world. I know in the small business I managed, there is simply no way we could have hired someone with a physical disability. We made product, we loaded product into truck, we delivered product all over the state. It was a very hands on job where you were either on your feet, and working with big machines that could take your arms off, or you were driving and delivering 1/4 to 1/2 ton of boxes of stuff on delivery days. We busted our rear ends off and were doing good to have 3 employees (one of which was the owner). No real benefits. We were doing good to stay afloat during the non busy season, but, you know, it was a job. 

I think most businesses operate under those conditions, or at least under that mindset. Some bigger operations likely have more front office and non-physical labor tasks that could be performed by persons with physical and mental disabilities, but most small businesses do not have that luxury. But even in larger operations in a consumer culture of "we want our product, and we want it 5 minutes ago..." it takes a specific management style to be able to carve out jobs and tasks that people with disabilities can perform. It also takes a certain cash flow to even be able to consider that sort of position because paying someone $15+/hour for labor that is not really worth even $5/hour is a hard sell to businesses.

You can try to appeal to businesses that offering such a job to a handicapped person is an act of charity. That may or may not sell. You can offer tax incentives to offer such jobs. Sometimes you breaks on payroll taxes or other corporate welfare tax write offs if you hire certain classifications of individuals like ex-cons or what have you in a sort of a "we'll help out the state by hiring this person if the state helps with my bottom line when it comes to tax season" kind of arrangement. That's all well and good in theory, but you have to have a functional HR department to be able to pull that off to even be able to apply for such programs and also to oversee integrating and training such a person into the company workforce.

Unlike the education system, businesses do not have to have an IEP for workers. IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) are tailored special education plans for people who are having trouble passing classes in the normal educational model/classroom because of learning or other disabilities. I am over-simplifying that definition, and please don't think I am making light of special education needs. I certainly am not. My point is that why schools (at least public schools) are required to offer IEPs, businesses (as are most private schools) are not. Once you become an adult, it becomes much for difficult to get hired or get reasonable accommodations once hired. Therein is the kicker: once hired. Once you get hired, there are some protections for reasonable accommodation, but getting hired is the hard part. Many businesses simply don't hire people with disabilities. Sometimes that is because they can't afford to, or at least they think they can't. Sometimes they simply don't want to out of some prejudice. Sometimes they are afraid they might get sued if they do hire and can't meet the reasonable accommodation standards. Sometimes businesses would be inclined to, but it's never been done and they simply are afraid to try because they don't know how to deal with people with disabilities. To be fair to those companies, they don't want to set people to fail through their own self acknowledged ignorance.

So, this brings me back to the original Free Press article on this topic that peeked my interest. (Full disclosure: The Free Press can be weird on many topics, but this article is pretty good.) I think what the gist of that writer was saying, if I can paraphrase, is "Are we hurting by helping?" I think this is a very important point to consider because in the legislative process, the rush to reform often creates something even worse than the original problem itself. It wastes more money, restricts rights, creates bigger bureaucracy, or any myriad of monstrosities that have unintended social consequences. 

History is littered with examples of the government rushing to pass some knee jerk legislation to combat some crisis (whether real or manufactured) because they feel they just need to pass something. "We have to do something!" even if the something is to throw the baby out with the bath water. One has only to look to some of the absolutely laughable nonsense they rushed to pass when FDR took office during the Great Depression. People were starving because of the Great Depression, and yet to inflate the prices of agricultural good to supposedly help the farmer, the government bought up (or more often just seized) all the surplus wheat and corn, put them all into warehouse stockpiles, and burned it all. No, seriously...literally took a match to it all. Concurrently, one of the largest famines in history in the Ukraine was going on at the time (hundreds of thousands of people dying of starvation) and the US Federal Government is seizing and burning thousands of tons of wheat and corn and agricultural products. Total madness, but hey, they were "helping" the Depression because "bureaucracy is Democracy in action!" (That's an actual ad campaign put out by the Federal government in magazines at the time.)

If you want to read something really hysterical, look up the Great Emu War of 1932 in Australia. Hoards of emus (yes, the big birds) were running amok against Aussie farmers. The government called out the Australian military "because we have to do something, mate!" to hunt down all the emus in what became known sardonically by the world press as the Great Emu War. Funny thing is: the emus won! (seriously...) After all this wasted money, resources, and army deployment, the Australian military put up the white flag and acknowledged they couldn't control the emu population and went home. You can't make this stuff up...

Businesses are not going to hire someone for a $15/hour job if there is no way that person is going to be worth $15/hr of work. Equal pay for equal work is one thing. Attempting to get a business to do something that makes no business sense simply is not going to happen. Businesses know business. The Federal Government can hire tons of people to do no work and still pay them out of the Federal coffers. The biggest employer in the history of the world is the US Federal Government: a little over 3 million people are covered by the Civil Service Act.

Read that again: Civil Service Act. The US Federal civilian government is the biggest employer in the history of the world. That does not include the US Department of Defense. If you include the military and all the people who work for the military (service and civilian), the US Government (both civil and the Department of Defense) employs over 6 million people. The largest privately owned employer in the world is Walmart at 2.3 million employees, which is also a crazy number but that's a discussion for another blog.

So, my point is this: you are not helping people if what you are doing is going to kill all this jobs. You think you might be trying to give them dignity, but you can't have dignity if you have no jobs of any kind. The government can run trillions of dollars in deficit and debt and remain afloat even with 6 million employees, but governments don't operate on fiscal reality. Businesses can't do that. I am all for helping out the little guy, but there has to be a fair balance for both employer and employee.

Simply legislating a hope does not make it a reality.