- Registrado
- 4 de Jun, 2020
Because they are actually profoundly disabled. They are the types of people the welfare state is actually for in the first place.
Wikipedia says 20% of US adults with Down's syndrome do some paid work. Maybe a small percentage of them can work a semi-normal job, at a family business maybe. But I would guess the large majority of them work in sheltered workshops.
I actually worked in a sheltered workshop for the intellectually disabled as an assistant. Not everyone there had downs, but it was easily the most common affliction, maybe half of them? One of the jobs we had them doing was packing screws into bags for a local furniture factory. This was the only external contract we had, until the factory shut down. Of course, they only used the downies to pack screws out of good will for a small portion of their production in the first place, because they worked very slowly and each bag had to be checked individually by the support staff because they made so many mistakes. Many of the downies continued packing screws for years afterwards, even though they didn't get sent anywhere, because it was so hard to find something else that they could actually do.
Another thing we produced was firelighters made out of old newspapers and candle wax. The idea is that the process is divided into very small and simple steps, right? We got old newspapers, removed the staples (most of the downies couldn't do that), sliced them into equal sized strips, rolled them tightly into little rolls (most of the downies couldn't do that), tied a string on them (most of the downies definitely couldn't do that), and dipped them in molten wax (downies could do that, but under supervision because they could easily make a mess. Also it took like 5 seconds per huge batch). My job also included zipping up their trousers after they went to the toilet and cutting up their food at lunch because a lot of them couldn't do that either.
That's even without getting into their work ethic, because guess what; being retarded doesn't inherently make you a reliable or hard worker. Some of the downies would shove a few fistfulls of screws into a bag and then shuffle off to do something else, because work is boring.
The whole business was basically about playing pretend that severely retarded people can do profitable work. In reality, it's all taxpayer funded, and most of the work was done either directly by the support staff, or under constant supervision, by people who had masters degrees in social work. And every time it was mentioned in the newspapers it was made out as if it actually was a profitable business for the disabled, further contributing to the incredibly rosy and unrealistic idea people have about the capabilities of people with Down's syndrome.
Intellectual disability is not a joke, you know. We are talking about people who need velcro shoes because they literally can't learn how to tie a knot. Who have barely any functional language. A small percentage of people with Down's syndrome can do things like stack shelves and mop floors, but for most of them that is actually too difficult for them to do, especially without supervision.
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