{"id":369357,"date":"2018-07-14T08:23:03","date_gmt":"2018-07-14T07:23:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/tech-industrys-push-to-hire-autistic-workers-could-lead-to-hyper-exploitation\/"},"modified":"2018-07-14T08:23:03","modified_gmt":"2018-07-14T07:23:03","slug":"tech-industrys-push-to-hire-autistic-workers-could-lead-to-hyper-exploitation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/tech-industrys-push-to-hire-autistic-workers-could-lead-to-hyper-exploitation\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Industry\u2019s Push to Hire Autistic Workers Could Lead to Hyper-Exploitation"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>For autistic people, employment prospects are grim. Using data collected in 2014 and 2015, a Drexel University<span>\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/drexel.edu\/autismoutcomes\/publications-and-reports\/publications\/National-Autism-Indicators-Report-Developmental-Disability-Services-and-Outcomes-in-Adulthood\/#sthash.aC8H4ESB.dpbs\">study<\/a><span>\u00a0<\/span>found that only 14 percent of autistic adults in the United States hold paying jobs. In 2016, the university reported that while 60 percent of autistic adults who complete vocational training secure jobs, the majority earn<span>\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/drexel.edu\/now\/archive\/2016\/May\/NAIR_2016\/\">poverty-level wages<\/a>. The issue isn\u2019t limited to the United States: Gainful employment rates for autistic people remain comparatively low in a number of other nations, including the<span>\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.co.uk\/entry\/16-percent-of-people-with-autism-are-in-full-time-paid-work_uk_5811e71be4b0ccfc9561da6f\">United Kingdom<\/a><span>\u00a0<\/span>and<span>\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.abs.gov.au\/ausstats\/abs@.nsf\/Latestproducts\/4428.0Main%20Features62012\">Australia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In recent years, major corporations \u2014 particularly those in tech \u2014 have<span>\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/business\/archive\/2016\/12\/autism-workplace\/510959\/\">purported<\/a><span>\u00a0<\/span>to<span>\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/michaelbernick\/2016\/12\/13\/where-is-autism-employment-heading-in-2017\/#5c656aa01e35\">offer<\/a><span>\u00a0<\/span>an antidote. Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Yahoo and German software company SAP, among others, have demonstrated a mounting interest in hiring autistic candidates, introducing programs ostensibly designed to recruit them. The logic: At once, these companies address an employment crisis and avail themselves of what Microsoft calls an \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.microsoft.com\/on-the-issues\/2017\/04\/03\/join-us-working-together-help-people-autism-enter-workforce\/\">untapped<\/a>\u201d pool of talent.<\/p>\n<p>Efforts to engage people on the autism spectrum interested in pursuing tech careers are, in theory, laudable, especially in light of the current labor landscape. What the work-in-tech narrative elides, however, is these initiatives\u2019 exploitative, paternalistic treatment of the people they claim to exalt.<\/p>\n<p>Conceived as a vehicle of self-actualization in the 1990s, the neurodiversity movement contends that neurological differences such as dyslexia and autism aren\u2019t \u201cdisorders,\u201d as much scientific literature classifies them, but natural human variations. More recently, some media outlets have appropriated neurodiversity as a corporate boon. Last year, the<span>\u00a0<\/span>Harvard Business Review<span>\u00a0<\/span>deemed workers on the autism spectrum a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/hbr.org\/2017\/05\/neurodiversity-as-a-competitive-advantage\">competitive advantage<\/a>\u201d for companies, touting such reductive qualities as \u201cloyalty\u201d and \u201cappreciativeness of having been given a chance,\u201d while citing productivity growth and public relations boosts. In 2016,&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/truthout.org\/articles\/tech-industrys-push-to-hire-autistic-workers-could-lead-to-hyper-exploitation\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For autistic people, employment prospects are grim. Using data collected in 2014 and 2015, a Drexel University\u00a0study\u00a0found that only 14 percent of autistic adults in the United States hold paying jobs. In 2016, the university reported that while 60 percent of autistic adults who complete vocational training secure jobs, the majority earn\u00a0poverty-level wages. The issue [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-369357","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}