Beyond Wage Labor

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

The recent case of a blind Jewish camper, Solomon Krishef of Grand Rapids, Michigan, who was told he could not be accommodated by Camp Ramah in Canada despite already being at the camp for some weeks, powerfully highlights how accommodation of disabled people continues to be regarded as a burdensome after thought. In a similar vein, many workplaces and union offices frequently fail to have the ramps in place that would allow disabled people who require wheelchairs for mobility to flourish.Even for religious progressives and advocates of social justice who incorporate anti-racist and anti-sexist practices into their daily work, disability politics too often is new and unfamiliar ground. For far too long, leftist organizations have been deficient in ensuring that meeting spaces are accessible to disabled people. Our disability issues are not identified as priorities, and the left press far too often ignores demonstrations by disabled people.Once progressives make a more widespread commitment to incorporating disability politics into their social and political frameworks, they will find that disability politics will also expand and strengthen their efforts to envision a more inclusive economic system: a thorough understanding of disablement actually provides a starting point for the creation of a post-capitalist economy that values people for their humanity rather than for their wage labor.By promoting the decommodification of labor (in other words, pushing for a new socioeconomic order in which social services and supports are treated as universal rights rather than conditioned upon an individual’s ability to earn wages), disabled people could be strongly allied with those who seek to end the plutocratic system that enriches a tiny minority while providing increasingly precarious — if any — work for growing numbers. This decommodification perspective is all the more relevant in the post-2008 economic crash environment, in which the stock market recovery has not translated into a significant number of new jobs for the working class.The focus of the disability rights movement that emerged in Britain and the United States in the 1960s is clear: it is the structural barriers in society, such as the lack of physical access to wheelchair users, that prevent the participation of disabled people in daily life, rather than the medical impairment of a person. Disability is a social construct that can be challenged through political action. The fact that someone cannot walk and must use a wheelchair does not mean that she cannot attend college unless the college fails to provide wheelchair accessible washrooms, classrooms, and dormitories. By making a sharp distinction between physiological impairment and disability, the disability rights movement has fostered wide-ranging community mobilizations on an array of issues spanning employment, transportation barriers, and more.In many areas, the American disability rights movement, a vibrant coalition of various impairment-specific groups, has been a stunning success. As early as 1977, disability rights activists mobilized to occupy the Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) offices in San Francisco to protest the failure of the Carter administration to release disability access regulations pursuant to the Rehabilitation Act. After several weeks, the protests resulted in the successful release of the regulations. In the 1980s, activist groups like American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) used both colorful direct access tactics and strategic litigation to draw attention to transportation barriers on buses, which were an affordable and critical mode of transportation for unemployed disabled people. Building on the symbolism of buses in American society (which gained political significance as a result of the Civil Rights movement) and aided by the influence of returning disabled Vietnam veterans, wheelchair users overcame the resistance of bus companies and the hostility of some bus drivers to implement a system of lifts and ramps to allow wheelchair users to independently use fixed-route bus systems. Years of activism culminated in the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, which prohibits discrimination against disabled people in employment, public transportation, and other arenas. ADAPT went on to fight for the provision of attendant services for disabled people to ensure people who require assistance with activities of daily living such as bathing, dressing, and toileting can live independently in the community.Sadly, triumph in areas like transportation access has not translated into success in employment. Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which focuses on employment discrimination, has done little to date to improve the employment rate of disabled people. Many disabled Americans remain outside the labor market, and Samuel Bagenstos has documented how the employment rate of people with disabilities declined throughout the 1990s. For example, in his book Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement, Bagenstos shows that the employment rate for working-age men with disabilities (defined narrowly) fell from 42.1 percent in 1990 to 33.1 percent in 2000. While the causes of this decline are complex and there are undoubtedly statistical measurement issues to be addressed, it is undeniable that the rise of neoliberal flexible labor markets has contributed to this failure. The Keynesian era of “a job for life” has been replaced with an hourglass economy in which many workers scramble at multiple jobs to make ends meet because they are underpaid. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the private sector union density rate in the United States has fallen to less than 7 percent, which is extremely low by both international and historic standards. Management decisions about job accommodations are rushed because job tenure is shorter and workers are expected to complete tasks at an increasingly hectic pace. Companies are reluctant to provide accommodations for temporary workers who may simply be gone next week.In order to fully include disabled people as citizens, we need to value people based on their contributions to society, not as assessed by the profit system. Many disabled people will never be efficient workers in capitalist terms. In a pioneering piece in Monthly Review a decade ago, disability activist Sunny Taylor questioned the practice of valuing people by their labor market value and championed the right not to work. As Taylor put it, “The right not to work is the right not to have your value determined by your productivity as a worker, by your employability or salary.” Refusing commodification would strengthen the disability rights movement, build solidarity between those who are inside and outside the labor market, and assist those who are challenging capitalist exploitation more broadly.As an interim measure, we could implement a wide range of measures to empower disabled people in the existing labor market. One idea, derived from the work of French scholar Alain Supiot, is to create a system of Social Drawing Rights. Each worker would be issued credits that could be used over the course of a lifetime for skills training or a sabbatical, should an employee become disabled. Disability supports, such as assistive devices that enable a disabled worker to do specific tasks, would no longer be linked to a particular job. Rather, disability supports would be tied to the individual as a matter of right, allowing employees greater freedom and mobility. This system would shift the emphasis from job security to employment security, recognizing that in the new economy, the vast majority of employees will have many different jobs over the course of their careers. Such an approach would also tremendously assist others who have gaps in their labor market participation, such as single parents who take time off work to raise their children.Even as progressive groups push for national or transnational economic measures such as Social Drawing Rights, they must also make a concerted effort to incorporate disability justice into their political frameworks and make their organizing spaces accessible. Perhaps it would be helpful for groups involved in this effort to read Truth and Revolution, Michael Staudenmaier’s recent book on how the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO), a left organization founded in Chicago in 1969 and influenced by Trinidadian socialist C.L.R. James, took concrete steps to ensure that its union work was sensitive to issues of race at a time when racism was rampant in unions. Although it was a tiny and sometimes idiosyncratic organization, STO nevertheless had the merit of being one of the few organizations in the United States to think deeply and systematically about how to address issues of white skin privilege in its political praxis in ways that magnified working class consciousness.A similar process of consciousness-raising and change needs to happen to incorporate a disability rights commitment into contemporary progressive organizing. This means systematically conducting accessibility audits before one selects a meeting space. It means ensuring that accessibility information is provided in publicizing meetings and other organizing events. And it means substantively incorporating disability politics and accessibility into other struggles, whether one is focused on ending sexual violence or fighting homelessness.A strategy that refuses commodification would lessen the perennial tensions that have always existed within the fragmented disability rights movement. The fault lines are many (acquired disabilities vs. born disabled, injured in the work-place vs. injured in sports, and more), and too often disabled people are pitted against each other. A focus on decommodification would lessen the distinctions between those who are active labor market participants and those who rely on disability support as their primary source of income. Instead of fueling division and competitiveness, we can cultivate solidarity and thereby develop a greater capacity to challenge the state to provide access.If we succeed in making social supports no longer contingent on employment status, we will also pave the way for stronger civil disobedience campaigns in the future. While ADAPT has been very successful in its strategy of civil disobedience, some disabled people have not felt able to participate in its actions because they cannot risk the consequences of arrest when supports and health insurance are linked to employment status. A strategy of decommodification liberates people to work as they choose and truly achieve Marx’s famous vision of a society where one can “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, [and] criticize after dinner.”A materialist theory of abled privilege rooted in explaining the political economy of disablement could shed real light on the oppression faced by disabled people and how people can work together to fight it, inside and outside the workplace. Ultimately, however, a rank and file disability rights movement should have the courage to refuse commodification and build a world of social justice for people of all abilities. How could this be achieved? Campaigns for a single payer universal health care program are an important first step. As the economic pie continues to generate few jobs and to concentrate wealth among a tiny minority, a medium-term objective ought to be a national minimum income for all, decoupled from the highly stigmatizing and punitive patchwork of welfare programs remaining in the United States. In the longer term, the introduction of a system of Social Drawing Rights would level the playing field for people of all abilities to contribute as best they can to making a better, accessible world that allows each individual to flourish.