Permanently Unemployable.

Deutsche Fotothek, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako

Permanently unemployable is not the same as being disabled.

I was speaking to a gentleman the other day. We were sitting in a waiting room. I made some remark about the weather and he opened right up. There are a lot of lonely people in this community.

“There’s not much work around these days.” I remember saying that too.

“I want to work but they won’t let me.” That’s what the man said.

He told me that he wanted to work but that his Ontario Disability Support Program case-worker, had told him not to do it.

“You’ll just lose your benefits, and it’s hard to get them back again.” His worker was absolutely correct.

She knows what she is talking about.

The gentleman was using a short aluminum cane to walk with and he had some kind of brace or bandage on his right foot. He was in his early sixties. That might have been a simple injury, and it might have healed up in a month or two.

There was more to it, a lot more.

The gentleman was an epileptic. He suffered from seizures and could not hold a driver’s license.

No employer who knew about his condition would hire him. That’s because they were afraid that he might have a seizure on the job, and somehow injure himself. It’s pretty easy to injure yourself when you have a seizure. They can fall and hit their head. They can swallow their tongue and suffocate. Not every employee knows First Aid. 

They can fall on someone else, a co-worker, or a customer, and drag them to the ground, injuring them and causing all sorts of nasty liabilities for the employer.

Workplace insurance costs money, whether it is a private or public service provider. The gentleman might not have had a lot of skills, but then, where would he acquire them in the first place?

In order to make themselves more ‘employable,’ a person cannot waive their rights under the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board legislation in the Province of Ontario. It would be a violation of their human and civil rights, even if they were willing, and no matter how badly they wanted to work. It would also tend to encourage employers, the scabbier ones, to look for such folks and then prey on them as employees. They would have no workplace insurance, and most likely they would be getting a lower rate than the person at the next desk, kiosk or service counter. Yes, there are employers like that. Plenty of them.

The gentleman was permanently unemployable, and yet he could walk. He could talk. He was not stupid.

How many times had some well-meaning person said: “Surely there must be something you could do.”

Would you ride in a taxi driven by this man? What if you knew about his condition? What if you had your kid or grandkid with you? Would you like him on a jobsite somewhere, working alone at night, as a security guard? If you rode in that cab, would it be better for you if you didn’t know about his condition?

What if he had a car accident, and you and your attorney found out later, about his condition? What if his employer found out about it later, because the guy wanted to work and just didn't tell him?

That’s why we have disability pensions, and that’s why we have the class of beneficiary called ‘permanently unemployable.’

There are all kinds of reasons why a person might not appear disabled and yet be disabled.

There are all sorts of reasons why a person is not actually disabled in the classic sense, looking like a quadriplegic in a wheelchair and yet be permanently unemployable.

If a person suffered seizures, or was deaf, they might be unemployable. Yet when they line up at the food bank and someone a little more fortunate drives past on the way to their employment, employment that might not be highly-paid or even full time, there could be a tendency to leap to conclusions.

There might be a tendency to make character assessments, often based on some other person—someone they know from somewhere else. Every poverty-stricken person they see fits into that class. It’s a kind of social bigotry, one that doesn’t rely on skin colour or racial profiling.

They might not approve of that other person. That disapproval becomes a kind of blanket disapproval, to a certain type of mindset.

In certain disorders, the subject is frantic to find help, a solution. A cure.

Some afflictions have no cure, and sometimes the treatments have so many side effects that the people go off the medications. Sometimes, and I have experienced this myself, a simple two or three-dollar co-pay is beyond their means.

They can’t afford their meds.

Now, a certain type of mindset will see this as connected, even though it isn’t really.

Some people self-medicate. They are seeking relief from pain, depression, suffering of one kind or another. 

They just don’t want to suffer any more, they can’t seem to get help anywhere, and have nowhere else to turn. They try to obliterate the pain, or even just themselves. They can't take it any more. It's that simple sometimes.

And so they take drugs, sometimes anything they can get…literally. Some of those drugs are illegal. And yet, for example marijuana, tranquilizers, or illicit pain medications, they are seeking relief of some ailment which they might not even be able to describe properly or identify. This is one reason why alcohol is the most abused drug in the repetoire. It's cheap, it's easy, and to some extent it's even socially acceptable. You can get it anywhere, and there are plenty of like-minded individuals for mutual enabling. You don't have to hide your habit. You can obliterate yourself, and nobody even asks why.

Not every sufferer has a proper diagnosis.

It took twenty years before I knew that I suffered from depression. Yet I had been given more than one diagnosis, and I had seen any number of doctors.

I was told ‘possibly’ that I might suffer from ‘some sort of anti-social personality disorder.’

There might be good reasons for a mistaken diagnosis.

I bitterly resented being sent to a shrink when I had a back injury and all I wanted was my frickin’ disability pension. I fought two and a half years for that pension. That was a stormy interview, and the psychologist did not give a definitive diagnosis. They would require much more time with the subject, (me) in order to make a proper assessment. That’s exactly what they told the ODSP.

Another doctor suggested that I might be suffering from manic depression. Another one said ‘cyclo-thalamic personality.’ I still don’t even know what that is. Basically what they told me was ‘…when you feel bad, you feel very bad, and when you feel good, you feel very good…’

That’s understandable given the nature of depression. There is nothing quite like the feeling of being ‘good’ again, after a long bout of serious depression—and I was suicidal, on one occasion, for a year and a half.

That’s a long time to wrestle with thoughts of suicide, ladies and gentlemen. I wanted to kill myself so very, very badly…sure glad I didn’t do it, eh? That was only eight or nine years ago.

Life is worth living, and I’m doing okay. I promise you that, okay?

It was only when I got on the internet, (and therefore I could frickin' well look it up) that I could really confirm the diagnosis that made sense; in that I was a guy who fell from a scaffolding, broke his back in three places. My whole life was destroyed, and I was never going to work at my old job ever again. That’s a tough thing to deal with.

And yes, ladies and gentlemen, I had suffered from depression, off and on, since I was about fourteen years old. One day that all became clear, and then things got better because at least then I knew what the hell I was dealing with.

Depression can be treated, but the back injuries are permanent and they made me permanently unemployable in conventional terms.

Employers think in conventional terms.

Even then, I did get work from time to time. I never lasted very long at the relatively unskilled construction jobs where I could at least work. I never lasted long enough to qualify for unemployment benefits, which would have been a kind of solution—hang in there as long as you can, and then just try to make it through the winter sort of thing. Nowadays if you quit your job, you are barred from collecting unemployment. The government of the day knew exactly what impact that would have on some people’s lives. They’re not stupid, ladies and gentlemen.

As often as not, I worked as an independent subcontractor. If you are working for someone else, they expect you to be ready, willing and able to work, at least five days a week. They want their forty hours out of you.

Sooner or later, all those jobs blew up in my face as well.

And so I had to find a better way.

I’m fifty-five years old. I still have unpaid student loans going back to the early nineties, when I confronted the problem by studying journalism. What that means is that I simply can’t get student loans or grants. I would have to repay those other loans first, and I might be a bit of a bad risk.

I am not very suitable for retraining anyway, not at my age, and being back in school with a bunch of spoiled-rotten twenty year-olds who are away from home for the first time and just there to party and get laid doesn’t have a whole lot of allure for one such as I.

And so, I write.

I collect my pension. I try to stay out of trouble, I know exactly what my blessings are, and every so often, I try to do a little good in the world.

I figure it’s the least I can do, to try and contribute something to the community.

Anyhow, thank you for listening, ladies and gentlemen.

Sometimes its good to talk about such things.

END

The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue is my thirteenth novel. It's available exclusively from Amazon for the time being, and it's only $3.99, minus whatever discount Amazon throws in there.