Petition for employers to hire autistics

Post Reply New Topic

Hire Employees On The Autism Spectrum
Sign the pledge encouraging companies to hire individuals with autism
http://thebreastcancersite.greatergood. ... 2ec0a82937

I really relate to this opinion piece from the firm J P Morgan re hiring practice and AS:

https://www.ozy.com/opinion/an-untapped ... trum/79008

That's pretty kewl. I cant say I have a good opinion of that company in the way they do business but it's really good they're becoming aware of the strengths & abilities some Aspies have & are willing to go outside the box by hiring them. I wish more companies would follow suit. I cant do those types of jobs & I NEVER mention autism during a job interview since I have physical disabilities to mention but it's still great for other Aspies & autism awareness.

My principles tend to grate extremely with this idea that we should promote autism or [insert anything here] in the workplace over productivity as a work force. In my mind, the former tends to undo the very thing it aims to achieve by creating a hypersensitive focus on individuals and their issues that shouldn't be issues, thus giving it special treatment.

It is not to say I don't admire the cause, however.

Last edited by TheSpectrum on 23 Apr 2018, 8:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

I see the comments on these articles usually revolve around issues within the workplace rather than before someone is hired highlighting that their children/grandchildren have adhd, ocd etc. I can relate alot to what these people are saying unfortunately I never make it to the desk or shop floor or whatever so I can't really prove my competence in the workplace just from the small amounts of work that I have done in the past.

I haven’t seen usage of the word “kewl” since the old days of IRC. Well, in my case it was the late 1990s.

Well what good does hiring do, if they'll just fire you or stop giving you hours without telling you why? That is my problem, granted getting hired is very difficult to if you have a non-existent job history due to having been on disability.

Sometimes I reflect on this noxious culture of "teams" which developed during the recent decades along with the fashion for the "cult of management, MBAs" and so on that developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The team stuff is based on a sports model, where winning is more important than anything else. But unlike the sports model, team leaders are not coaches of individual strengths, they are supervisors and enforcers of conformity.

This was never going to be a good fit for AS people, who tend to value results as valid or not, who value innovative thinking rather than conformity. Team culture is as NT as it gets, where the sum of the whole is assumed to be the sum of participants with the same values and same goals, where innovation is not valued, where fresh thinking is not particularly valued, in fact I think it is actively devalued, and regarded as a threat.

I suppose another model of team culture could be the beehive, where there are a lot of worker bees to service queen (or king) bees.

Those models go hand in hand with open offices, so that the workplace is readily available to conformity police (team leaders) and where mediocrity (as long as it is conformist) is valued over excellence and innovation. That these changes occurred when they did should tell us something.

Are there any AS employers here who organise and encourage their employees in more AS friendly models? What would those models be like, the AS friendly ones to maximise AS contributions?

^ Well said, B19.

It's now about 30 years since I reached employable age, and over that time, the "autism-friendliness" of employment has noticeably declined in my opinion (and it wasn't exactly stunning to begin with!) Like you, I think part of it has to do with the rise of the "professional manager"; people who study the theory of management formally and are then parachuted into organisations with no experience of the many ways in which shop floor employees approach their work, or even the nature of the business itself.

There are also economic factors at play too, I think. The rise of customer service at the expense of craft and manufacturing work has obvious implications for people with social impairments, as does the rise in variable-hours, temporary and agency employment which require unpredictable changes of timing, venue and colleagues.

The best managers that I've had have all been people with years of experience of doing the same job that I was doing, and who, without any "special needs training", just understood that each worker had their own approach to the job. Some prefer the variety of multi-tasking, others prefer big blocks of the same job, etc. - and then work out the best compromise for sharing out the work. Someone who has spent years working alongside others in the same profession doesn't need to give everyone a Myers-Briggs test to work that one out! (aside: Myers and Briggs themselves said that their test should not be used for assessing employment suitability - I've pointed this out to a couple of haughty HR managers who insisted on using it; they were not impressed!)

And, for the life of me, I cannot understand why, when I'm sat at a workstation soldering circuit boards, do I have to maintain my "corporate happy clappy smiley face" at all times? In customer service, I can see why a certain demeanour makes sense, but if I get more boards finished by looking like I've just sucked on a lemon, what the hell is the problem? This did not used to be such an issue; it was just accepted that you might have a grump on sometimes - the work still got done, though. Pride in doing a good job is good for my self-esteem, but I don't go there to get some kind of fake, surrogate "family" feeling from a bunch of people who I know will throw me out with the trash just for not mirroring some marketing claptrap "corporate ethos".

I'm conscious too, that I'm relatively one of the lucky ones, even allowing for every job burning me out after a few years. I have developed a reasonable ability to "pass" - I can't begin to imagine how awful it must be for those of us for whom that is just not possible.

Two words sum it all up for me; "human resources" - makes me think of the film Soylent Green every time I hear it!

Yes, "human resources" is a term that makes me nauseous. And HR departments are management tools to serve and protect managers and supervisors, and management bullies, in my experience.

I entered the workforce in the early 60s, which was a more enlightened time, overall, in terms of industrial relationships. It was founded on the idea of a "fair go" and the important recognition that productivity increased when workers were respected for their contribution. There are still some rare employers like this, though the culture is now one that regards abuses such as "zero hour contracts" - which are abusive - as "clever" management strategies to serve their own interests and crap on the people subjected to them, taking away even more power from the most powerless part of these businesses. It would have been regarded as immoral when I began working, and it is immoral, exploitative and callous.

Shareholder interest (and profits) have been elevated to the predominant interest in publicly listed companies, and the shareholders are at a remove where they can turn a blind eye and pretend that this ethos is none of their concern. They have an indifference to, and often a contempt for, principles of equity. Part of this grew out of the cult of management. Prior to that, many business owners were self made, or had worked their own way up to management, in the real world. They could see the perspectives of those who worked as they had once worked, at lower levels of organisations. Many of those old survivors look askance at the MBA crap, that provided ballast for Friedmanite ideas and ideology (worker bees whose interests need not be considered at all). It was no accident that the rise of these two things happened at the same time. A dehumanisation process has occurred that is both damaging to NT and AS workers, but it is a double whammy for AS workers.

These changes were led and issued from the USA. They have infected the Western world and had very noxious flow on effects - the widening gap between workers and management, the serving of shareholder interests and contempt for workers, the transfer of an equitable share of profits from the wealth producers (workers) to management and shareholders, and the lack of accountability in public companies, whose annual reports and balance sheets are written not to inform but to deceive.

In the first couple of post war decades, there was a different ethos, where equity was seen as stability, and it was stability producing. The shared goals and fair go ethos was cultural capital. The worship of greed is part and parcel of the noxious changes since, and the Gordon Geckos didn't get taken down in the crises of the late 1980s and the later GFC in 2008. They flourished, because they were the architects of those calamities.

I think the fear of somebody shooting up the office or filing a lawsuit makes employers fear hiring anybody that is different and not a "team player". Also, technology means that separation between work life and home life has largely disappeared. Your employer can call you up at 3AM to ask a question or give you the assignment to be ready on his or her desk when you come in. This is when one is least prepared to "act professionally" and most likely have a shut or meltdown from unexpected change.

The change in work culture to group work and networking had a very bad effect on me.