After surrendering to love regarding this debate, I awakened early this morning with inspiration to write the following.

SUBMINIMUM WAGE HOT POTATO:HISTORY & IMPLICATIONS

THE SEATTLE SUB-MINIMUM WAGE HOT POTATO has deep roots and serious implications.

I’ve been watching a very heated conversation on the Seattle Commission on DisAbilities FB page. Now, the links to the conversations have been disabled. (no pun intended.). What I’ve seen is that the commission members don’t recognize the early level of intellectual developmental disability for which guardian decision making is required for an affected person’s wellbeing. It’s been claimed that all of the members have disabilities. One person, who writes at a very high, if inflammatory, level, claims to be intellectually developmentally disabled, but another writer on the thread refers to him as autistic and seems to think that is not a legitimate intellectual developmental disability.

Another person passionately, if rudely, objected to a participant’s referencing “eighteen month level mentation” as “offensive to all disabled people.” That person argued that a person who is 30 years old has a 30 year old intellect. Yet, the writer who used the “eighteen month” term thought “the age of developmental intellectual attainment” to be crucial information for knowing how to meet the affected person’s needs. I agree with the latter.

The conversation veered away from sub-minimum wage when one contributor who does support RHCs, but hadn’t written that, was accused of being “inauthentic” because she “supports segregation.” Her defense, though civil itself, provoked passionately irrational accusations of her supporting murder and rape. At first, I saw those comments as simply ignorant attempts to win an argument at the expense of rationality and civility. But after reflecting on it, I realized that they must have been born of the accuser’s deep fear and perception of institutions as prison-like environments where any terrible thing might happen to a resident. My thought is that while terrible things can happen anywhere, the strict oversight in RHCs makes them safer than other venues.

There were also comments by commissioners disdaining parents and guardians and denying their legitimacy as spokespeople for their children and wards. They expressed, as fact, their assumptions that all people with intellectual developmental disabilities could identify and express for themselves what was needed for them and so should be considered their own experts. This perception is what I began to consider to be their denial of early developmental cognitive arrest/delay.

 

I’m perceiving that the roots of what is becoming societal denial of early developmental cognitive arrest/delay are deeply embedded in the misuse of the term, “Mental Retardation. The sense of insult and shame at that label that was felt by people with higher levels of thinking and function, but whose development, otherwise, didn’t fit within typical social norms, was strong. Today, despite the replacement of the term, “mental retardation” with “intellectual disability,” those old, strong feelings, apparently still are operating to deny that there is any legitimacy in the literal concept of “mental retardation.” Those people are influencing powerful groups and public agencies throughout the country.

 

With the loss of the term “mental retardation” we lost a common language for early developmental cognitive arrest/delay. And since losing the wording, I believe we have been losing critical recognition of the phenomenon. Unfortunately, censorship of language doesn’t eradicate a phenomenon; it simply renders it less publicly visible. 

We must stop this denial snowball from gaining any more momentum. I’m only now recognizing how serious the danger is in allowing it to continue. For some time, it as been affecting public policy in such a way that it constrains positive measures needed by people whose cognitive ability became severely impaired at very early stages.  For instance: 

 

1. In the interest of protecting non-institutional residential rights of higher level people who do not need medical, therapeutic, and other resources to be very close to home, in some areas, laws have been passed that disallow locating residential facilities for people with intellectual developmental disabilities conveniently near a full service therapeutic facility for people with intellectual developmental disabilities.

 

2. To further the ability of people with higher level intellectual disabilities to be employed by regular businesses, to the detriment of their former workers with minimal cognitive skills, many sheltered workshops have been closed. Today, many of their former workers sit at home without daily activities. 

 

3. Now, the attempt to outlaw the sub-minimum wage threatens to foreclose the jobs of workers whose abilities are incompatible with the profitability of businesses, even with publicly supported job coaches. They, too, could wind up victims who sit at home without activities. 

 

Recognizing that people with higher level autism and people with early developmental cognitive arrest/delay are no more or less important than each other, the needs of both groups and those in between must be recognized in law as well as in society.

 

The next, important step, as I see it, is to begin reincorporating language that helps differentiate early developmental levels of cognition + their accompanying social or physical function from higher levels of intellectual developmental disabilities that are typical of people with  high enough levels of autism for them to be arguing for their own rights or at least to be able to benefit from significantly less intensive assistance and representation by guardians than those with early developmental  cognitive arrest/delays. 

 

The Seattle Commission on DisAbilities is a public entity. It’s make-up should include as much representation of people whose early developmental cognitive disability requires guardianship as it does of self-advocates. This should also be true of all other agencies which purport to advocate for all people with intellectual developmental disabilities.

 

Ideally, the Seattle City Council, which, currently is considering the bill to outlaw sub-minimum wage certificates could vote to table the issue until:

 


1) Protections for people with early developmental cognitive arrest/delay are incorporated

 

2) Provision is incorporated for better wage protections for people of higher intellectual disabilities whose work is underpaid due to the current sub-minimum wage certificates.

 

Then, the bill could be amended to accommodate the changes. Only then would a vote make sense. 

 

The time to address this request to the Seattle City Council is now. Please contact the members immediately.