I promised to finish my recap of Wolfensburger's last few points in his article "How to Comport Ourselves in an Era of Shrinking Resources" in the Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Vol. 48, No. 2, pp. 148-162 published by the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (April 2010). In the last section, Wolf tackles a specific example of "an arrangement of great promise that falls partially into the category of least bad alternative" (p. 160)
Wolf explains that the unemployment rate for handicapped people has been 60-70%, "despite all the vocational, rehabilitation, and supported employment efforts and a roughly doubling of expenditures in recent years" (p. 160). Yet, he says, nobody has achieved much thinking "outside of the employment box". He claims that he has been proposing, in vain, developing unpaid, valued adult work roles (for a number of reasons he explains in his writings on Social Role Valorization). According to Wolf, there have been at least four obstacles to unpaid work by handicapped adults; 1. North Americans now equate work with jobs - which Wolf declares was not always like that - once upon a time, everybody worked, most often without pay, but simply for their "keep"; 2. Ideologues have created an environment where unpaid work is interpreted negatively, shunned, and devalued. He closes this argument with "A handicapped person who helps to clean up two neighborhood businesses on an unpaid basis is more contributive to society than the executve of the Lehman Brothers financial firm who received half a billion dollars compensation a year (Roberts, 2008)..." (p. 160); 3. The paid service system ("empire" he calls it) lacks any incentive to develop unpaid work roles for dependent adults; 4. People don't get the idea of social role valorization and the importance of it above the notion that any work done by people with disabilities should be paid or it is not of value, is demeaning, or in some other way less than desirable.
Wolf's closing arguments include: acting ourselves, in a coherent, cohesive and compelling way, or else we can expect Society to act peremptorily in such a way that we get less than we could have perhaps bargained for otherwise; watch out for governments engaging in a "shell game" playing one advocacy group against another, "dividing and conquering" (his earlier notion of advocates seflishly pushing for their own singular agenda and "letting the devil take the hindmost"); draw up "doomsday plans" as some are doing in the business world - anticipatory planning, he calls it - to ensure an organized and respected response to situations that may develop in tmes of severe fiscal restraint; develop a "Think Tank" and/or series of national meetings with "wise participants" with a goal to evolve national strategies and policies which can be presented when needed.
Lastly, Wolf encourages us NOT to be like the "institutional people" of the 1970's who believed they would last forever - "do not fall into this recurring error [of not listening], but be imaginative, less fearful, and think ahead, and keep the welfare of people with impairments upmost." Unable to resist a "parting shot" he closes with "You should count yourself fortunate that you hear me say today some of the things that financial expert Suze Orman tells people for $80,000 a shot (Kolhatkar, 2009)..." (p. 161)
In my next blog, and probably the last submission on this article, I will propose my own thoughts and an overall review of Wolf's work in this article, in relation to the Ontario experience and what I have seen and heard from Wolf before.
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