This is an article from the pilot for Aspire, which is available here.
As a result of the current recession, capitalism is on its knees. To try and keep the system going, the powers that be often try to save money by either sacking low-paid workers or by not recruiting. We on the autistic spectrum are among those most at risk of suffering. For the vast majority of us who are out of work, it’ll be even harder to find a job. For the few lucky enough to have a job, should the bosses find out about their condition, they’ll be sacked immediately. For lower-functioning people, access to services from the state will be reduced as governments decide to keep the capitalist bosses going.
Unemployment is one of many things we have to be agitated about. However, most of our problems aren’t economic. Throughout our lives, all people have hurdles put in front of us. In the case of people on the autistic spectrum, we have a lot more, and that makes life much harder.
The obvious ones are social and communicatory. Many of us find it harder to communicate with others verbally. In order to focus on what we’re saying, we often avoid eye contact. We have great difficulty with reading other people’s emotions, and anxiety and subdued speech is also problematic.
However, the five biggest obstacles we face are all created by other people to try and marginalise us, just like they do with other minority groups. By ‘other people’, I mean the ruling class. The ones who’ve crammed bank note after bank note into the bloated piggybank of capitalism until it exploded, resulting in mass layoffs.
Unemployment
The unemployment rate for adults on the autistic spectrum in the UK is 85%, more than ten times the national rate. With around three-fifths of the total autistic population of just over half a million people being of working age, that adds up to around 300,000, equivalent to a city the size of Leicester.
In the current economic climate, bosses are becoming more reluctant to recruit, yet at the same time are more than happy to shed jobs if it means that they can maintain their opulent lifestyles. With the opportunity to save money becoming more enticing with each passing day, employers will come up with any excuse to sack someone. For the handful of autistics in work, this is worrying.
If an autistic worker is seen to be not socialising with their colleagues, and if an employer picks up on that, they’ll be gone. If an autistic worker publicly exhibits their poor social skills, they’ll be gone. The same goes if they’re unable to work in groups or seen as different from other workers.
To try and avoid this, many autistics try to hide their autism or Asperger’s by suppressing their quirks which make them what they are. I’ve tried this during university, and it worked for the first two years. However, if they can do it for just a short period of time and flip out under extreme pressure, they’ll be sacked on the spot.
For the 85% of us out of work, it’s even harder. Once out of education, you feel pressured into looking for work. While we know that we can do a job just as well as anyone who doesn’t have an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), the bosses don’t. Like many other people in positions of power, they either have no idea what you mean or assume you’re an introverted fuckwit, so if you mention on your CV that you’re on the spectrum, they’ll throw it straight into the waste paper bin in a corner of their office.
Something many autistics do when applying for a job is omit any reference to an ASD on a CV. This improves your chances of being offered an interview, but that unveils another problem: the interview itself.
For those among us who manage to get to the interview stage, we often struggle when faced with questions from someone we don’t know. Sometimes anxiety sets in, and we avoid eye contact in order to concentrate on our answer. If we stumble while in the middle of a reply, the employer starts to get the impression that there’s something wrong with us, and start to reach the conclusion that we’re ‘a bit thick’, so they decide not to offer us a job, preferring to hire a neurotypical with good social skills, regardless of whether they’re more or less qualified for the job.
After rejection, we feel downhearted, and our confidence begins to plummet. If we fail at another interview for the same reasons as before, we become even less confident until we eventually give up and throw ourselves in the bin marked ‘unemployable’, even though we’re highly skilled.
If asked to fill in an application form, there’s often a question asking whether you have a disability. If you answer ‘yes’, then go on to give details about your condition, an employer gets a glimpse of that, and without bothering to read the rest of the form, immediately decide to deny that person a fair opportunity of getting the role they’ve applied for.
In the middle of 2007, I had an experience with a Dewsbury-based employment agency where I was applying for a job with a local, minority newspaper. When I wrote in my covering letter that I had Asperger’s, the agency worker immediately removed it before sending it to the newspaper, claiming that what I had “wasn’t a disability”. I was offended, but didn’t do anything about it.
Stereotyping
Part of the reason why autistic unemployment is so high is because of the stereotype of the ‘introverted social fuckwit’ perpetuated by the media and those who claim to ‘help’ us. Because the capitalist bosses share an ideology with those two groups, they choose to believe it and decide that we’re unemployable, just like people with other disabilities.
The media have a habit of portraying us as either ‘mental’ or ‘helpless beings’, depending on which outlet you choose. The former is adopted by the likes of the Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph. The latter is adopted by the liberal, pseudo-left media such as the Guardian and Daily Mirror. By ‘the people who are supposed to help us’, I mean the likes of the National Autistic Society (NAS) and Autism Speaks. They choose to go along with the same stereotype as the Guardian and Mirror.
The rightwing media have a history of disablism, which often comes as part of the same package as their racism, sexism and homophobia. Although there is the occasional sympathetic piece about parents of autistic children, they often use derogatory phrases to describe the children such as ‘learning disabled’, implying that they’re a bit thick.
Some rightwing media columnists such as Simon Heffer use the term ‘autistic’ as an insult. Heffer used it to describe Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and while commenting on his surly demeanour and lack of emotion on the House of Commons benches during his time as Tony Blair’s deputy, said “does he have Asperger’s or something?”.
The left-ish media aren’t as bad when it comes to reporting issues concerning the autistic world, but when going for the autistic view, they always choose to interview a professional like Simon Baron-Cohen or Tony Attwood, instead of someone who experiences life on the spectrum on a day-to-day basis.
When it comes to the people and organisations that claim to represent us, they’re probably the worst when it comes to reinforcing and spreading stereotypes. In the UK, the NAS are the chief culprits. Their catchline of claiming to help people on the spectrum coincides with their plan to tug at the heartstrings of potential donors by going with their portrayal of all autistics as being in need of round-the-clock help.
By cashing in on trying to guilt-trip people into making donations, the NAS, or at least those at the top of their organisation, are profiting from the plight of people on the spectrum. The NAS are also trying to control autistic culture, by trying to keep a firm grip on what people can call us. On one of their posters, they said that the term ‘Aspie’ was offensive, even though many of us use that word to describe ourselves. There are many websites such as AspieWeb and Aspies For Freedom that use it, so why the fuck should we pay attention to what a bunch of careerists who pretend to care about us in order to justify a £50,000 annual salary say?
The NAS aren’t the only ones who do this. Autism Speaks are worse than the NAS when it comes to trying to claim autistic culture for themselves. Perhaps the worst example of this was their attempt to sue a blogger for selling a t-shirt emblazoned with ‘Autism Speaks can go away – I can speak for myself’. This caused outrage amongst many posters on online forums, but they went ahead with it regardless. That individual case suggests that Autism Speaks are not only against free speech, but they also want to maintain their vision of what the typical person on the spectrum is like – incapable of independent thought.
Organisations that aren’t specifically involved in autism are just as guilty. In January 2009, Action For Children ran an advert featuring a child with autism (or more likely, an actor playing an autistic child), who said that he kept lashing out at school because of his autism, and that AFC helped him calm down. What was wrong with that particular advert was its claim that all autistic children lash out for no particular reason. Something they didn’t realise is that some of us lose our temper because we’re provoked by a bully or a tutor who’s being over-critical.
Bullying
For those of us who’ve been in mainstream education, something we often encounter is bullying. For me, it was the most vivid memory I have of my childhood, and have struggled to remove it from my mind. Many see bullying as something that is inevitable in school, and should be left alone, but those who use that argument have never actually experienced it.
Bullies often do what they do because they’re either insecure, have a bad upbringing and take their frustration out on easy targets, or, in most cases, because they’re little Hitlers who follow whatever those at the top claim to be right. In school, forced collectivism and toeing a line means that anyone who’s slightly different from the rest stands out a little bit more, and that gives the bullies a target.
In some cases, when we’re on the end of bullying, we don’t know how to react because of our lack of ability when it comes to expressing emotions. In my case, I panicked, and lashed out at them, but often kicked a nearby stationary object instead of the person. Unfortunately, this happened a lot, and I was punished more often than the bully.
Rarely did the bully get reprimanded. It angered me even more, and to this day, I still want to get some physical revenge. This has happened to other people as well, and in isolated incidents, the one who’s being bullied ends up with something as harsh as a criminal record.
Even though academia isn’t a problem (as many of us go on to get graduate and post-graduate degrees), the teachers and Local Education Authorities see the social side of an autistic in a mainstream school, and start to wonder why we were sent there in the first place.
The reason many of our parents do their level best to get us into mainstream schools is because the provision at special schools is highly inadequate. Special schools do serve their purpose in helping lower-functioning disabled children, but for higher-functioning autistics, it doesn’t help us to realise our intellectual potential.
Bullying of people on the spectrum doesn’t end at the age of 16. If open with your autism, you may be open to jibes from workmates or fellow students. If open with neighbours about your condition, some local thugs may hear about it and target you. Fortunately, bullying tends to die down after high school for the majority of us, but discrimination doesn’t.
Curebies
If our flaws are noticeable, there’s always someone who says we need to be cured. Advocates of a cure for autism are called Curebies, and they have the support of the ruling class. Curebies say that we can be ‘fixed’, and automatically assume that because our social skills aren’t as good as those of NTs, that automatically means that we should be ‘corrected’.
What Curebies fail to realise is that we’re happy as we are. If you take away our condition, you take away a mass of great attributes that define ourselves. Our creativity, attention to detail, organisational skills, individuality and high intelligence would disappear, and we’d become dull.
Having an autistic mind isn’t like having arthritis or a broken limb. Just because we haven’t got the communication skills of an average NT means that we’re fucked in the head. We do some things better than NTs, and some things worse. That’s something that happens with everyone. No one’s perfect.
Curebies are no better than Nazis. By advocating a cure for autism, they’re basically calling for a ‘master race’, thus spoiling the diversity of human kind. They’re on the same level as those who either advocate forced labour for the disabled or the killing of disabled people.
It would be easy to dismiss Curebies, as it is with say, the BNP or UKIP, but they have backing from the ruling class. Some MPs are more than happy to lend their support to them, possibly in return for a directorship with a Curebie company when they retire/lose their seat. They’re not yet a serious threat, but with more people being diagnosed with an ASD, don’t be surprised if the state starts to see it as a problem and start listening to the Curebies.
How do we fight the four obstacles?
Although I and a few other contributors to Aspire would advocate direct action against the organisations and individuals who are responsible for our plight, there are many available methods. Here are a few suggestions:
/ Organise a protest outside a discriminatory employer who’ve been openly refusing to hire people because of their disability. Contact as many friends as you can who you think may be interested in going, and if you’re feeling up to it, contact the local media to inform them of your action to help raise publicity.
/ Start a petition against whatever issue you have with those who are making things worse for us. Post it online, and send it to someone who is in a position of power, such as a local MP.
/ Set up an autism rights group. There are a handful starting up around the country, such as the Free Gary group, and all it requires is finding some like-minded people on the spectrum.
/ Set up an online forum, message board or group on somewhere like Facebook. This often has a higher success rate than other methods because it doesn’t involve face-to-face interaction.
/ In a revolutionary situation, or if the economy’s gone even more tits-up than it is now, use direct action. This could involve occupying the office of a discriminatory employer/politician/leader of the NAS, storming an office, a protest or even a riot. With unemployment rising and the increasingly authoritarian government’s popularity falling, an opportunity for direct action could arise as early as this summer.
