It's progress, but it's only 114 job titles being struck and another 13 subject to extra justification. There are 3,127 on the "unskilled labor" list (all labor is skilled labor) and I've seen analysis that over 3/4ths of them are obsolete.
The Social Security Administration will eliminate all but a handful of those unskilled jobs from a long-outdated database used to decide who gets benefits and who is denied, ending a practice that advocates have long decried as unfair and inaccurate.
If the SSA wants to deny your benefits because they think you can work, they should be forced to find you an actual, literal, you-can-start-tomorrow-with-a-pay-advance fucking job placement.
So this is good news, but not great. SSA has issued two new Emergency Messages. One flatly excludes about a hundred jobs from consideration. The other includes a list of a dozen jobs but also includes a loophole you could drive a semi through (And vocational experts basically already do). Cont.>
There’s a change that will have a bigger impact than dropping those titles. The “relevant work period” has been dropped to 5 years from 15, meaning that the vocational analyses are only able to look at work done in the past 5 years; no more saying someone could do work they haven’t done in 12 years.
I’m just back to state and federal governments need to be employers of last resort — there are a million jobs that are totally unprofitable but need to be done, at every level of skill, from digitization to babysitting tree seedlings.
"jobs that are totally unprofitable but need to be done" is absolutely one of the things government is for... my gosh, *digitization*. so much digitization, and then every digitized document needs someone to index it for searchability...
thinking of 'weird things the WPA paid for' - collection of oral histories, transcription of cemeteries, sketches and floorplans of historic buildings... or just 'here hold this flashlight for the electrician'.
The law firm that helped me get disability had a job-specialist testify at my hearing about exactly that - no (full time, living wage) jobs would work around my disability.
There’s no reason that shouldn’t be available to everyone.
that's what they're doing in the UK; reports vary as to how many people have either died of whatever pre-existing condition they were not able to persuade their lickspittles to believe in, or ended themselves in despair. As always, the cruelty is the point.
If only that were the law (or even a permissible policy interpretation of the law SSA has to administer). Unfortunately, that's not the statute Congress wrote.
please reread my post, which clearly indicates what I consider to be an ideal state without any assessment about what changes would be necessary as to achieve it. I do not include "I know this would require sweeping changes but" disclaimers when the "ought" context is blatant.
Responses that treat a post as though it is operating in an "is" context when it is clearly operating in an "ought" context, and vice versa, are extremely tedious. Please do not do them.
Sorry, I was just trying to clarify where the blame lies. In other words, it's not properly the agency's fault, it's Congress'. This isn't an issue where the agency has discretion.
