Today I learned that where I live (Queensland, Australia,) disability support workers are expected to work with clients who have COVID and other contagious diseases WITHOUT PPE. Not even a mask is provided or required.
They are ALSO expected to WORK WITH CLIENTS if they themselves have COVID or other contagious diseases. Also with no PPE, not even a mask, provided or required.
Disability support workers are generally casual. No sick days, not even for COVID, not even if their work is why they got sick in the first place.
My disability support worker has had COVID 6-7 times. She refuses to work while sick during the contagious period - which her company does not like her doing and her income is heavily impacted by this - but has worked with broken bones and the like.
Personally I would fire my disability support company in a moment if someone with COVID showed up at my door. It's fucked up that the good support workers, the working class people, have to suffer the consequences of having integrity that their companies and the industry do not have. By refusing to kill their clients by bringing COVID to their homes.
NDIS, disability support in general, and infection control are completely failing both the workers and the disabled people in this scenario, and I didn't even know about this until today.
Content warnings: filicide/murder, ableism, eugenics
1 March of each year marks Disability Day of Mourning, where our community commemorates the murder of Disabled people (of any age, not just children), by their carers, particularly parents.
Yeah. The murder of Disabled people by their carers is such a big issue we have a day for it.
And if the carers end up in court, they are frequently let off on the basis it was a 'mercy killing'. That is eugenics.
A recent example of why the day is important is the murders of Leon, 16, and Otis, 14, in Australia. They had their whole lives ahead of them.
They should still be alive. So many Disabled people should still be alive. Because of ableism and eugenics, they are not.
That is why we mark 1 March each year.
For the very many we should not have lost.
A lot of the injustices experienced as a disabled person become just "oh yeah no obviously" when you fully internalise that your government's goal is to kill as many disabled people as possible.
It's so elementary but so many people don't realise that, like... the NDIS or social security or whatever it's called in your country doesn't exist to improve the lives of disabled people.
If the government wanted to give out "handouts", they would just do it. There would be no NDIS, no centrelink. The main, stated goal of these offices is to make sure as few people as possible are given government money.
That's why MyGov is so user-unfriendly. That's why centrelink makes you go through so many steps with so many arbitrary deadlines. They're padding it out for as long as possible in the hope that you die first.
The ironic part? If the government just gave out "handouts" to everyone who needed them, they would save money. Because their budget to keep the Disabled People Killing Machine running gets higher every year.
When you hear about the NDIS costing millions of dollars, the reporters saying it are using some tricky bullshit. They intentionally frame it as if the money given to people to live is what's costing so much. They conveniently don't mention the fact that, just like a business, the NDIS is expected to save money every year. So more and more money is spent on the systems designed to find excuses to kick people off it, enough that it offsets the amount actually saved.
Robodebt was only a "scandal" because of the public outcry. Robodebt was centrelink's greatest achievement at serving its purpose. That's why they're trying to do it all over again.
Obviously we don't have accessible infrastructure. Obviously we don't have the rights we need to survive. Obviously we're not given the tools to succeed. Disability is inherently oppositional to capitalism. For capital to grow, we must die.
Are a politician's superyachts really worth more than 5 and a half million lives?
@centipedekisses left these tags on another post I made, and I wanted to respond to it in its own post because it is a fascinating subject imo
I 100% agree, and personally believe that protection of sex workers, facilitating their unionization and providing equal protection to sex workers' labour is essential for disability liberation.
Sorry for the novel length post, this issue really pisses me off and I wanted to put my thoughts in order.
A lot of disabled people need specialized sex workers to facilitate sex with their partners, basically people who can position their bodies or even orchestrate specific motions for them. Even more disabled people will employ sex workers because, due to societal ableism, lookism and so on, sex workers are often the only way these people can access sex, because I mean, good luck getting dick on tinder when you're in a society that treats fucking an intellectually disabled bloke as morally equivalent to sex with a child, right?
I want to specify as well that disabled women and NB people also access sex workers often, so it's not a "disabled men" thing either.
Well! Where I live recently all sex-related services were cut from the disablity funding system, leaving many, many people, most of whom had been using sex services regularly before the implementation of the NDIS through preceeding systems, unable to get the pipes cleaned.
For over a month now, people with a disability have been unable to use NDIS funding for seeking sex worker services. Lived-experience advoca
The liberal justification for it was a kind of faux-feminist, "no one is entitled to sex" line, with the usual fearmongering about sex work never being possible within a consent framework, all sex workers being trafficked women, yadda yadda. A thing that we could easily answer by effectively facilitating unionization for sex workers, right, but "sex worker's union" is a combination of words that the centrist liberal mind can't Scrabble out, so we're instead in this bullshit situation.
You have to understand, currently the primary political weapon against the disabled in Australia is that we're too expensive to keep alive.
It's all very,
"German worker, that is your money, too." Y'know?
So the moral demand is that we disabled must never indulge in anything but the bare minimum to keep us alive. Rice gruel and an empty room with a cot and a blanket is the best you should want for. You didn't earn being alive, and society has no responsibility to you.
Now, sex is not perceived as a "need," but rather a luxurious "want," especially by people who's access to sex is not obstructed by something like a disability. So, it's too expensive for Mark and Bethany, a couple who both have various levels of paralysis, to hire someone to enable him to have vaginal sex with his wife. Similarly, it is beyond the pale for Melinda, who has a facial difference and isn't exactly a hit with the ableist boys on tinder, to hire a sex worker for a fast and easy blowie so that she does not lose her goddamn mind. In fact, these people do not believe lack of blowies will lead to Melinda losing her mind because again, we live in a strange world where people refuse to acknowledge that lack of sex can, in fact, be psychologically harmful.
Further vital to this is the perception that sex work is not "real work," or is not fair work, or moral work, or some bullshit like that. Rather, these fiendish diabolical women (again, male sex workers do not exist in the anti sex work mindset) must be raping these poor innocent disabled people for money enabled by evil support services who want to, um, waste the public purse, uh, feeding the disabeld to fiendish hooker rapists? Or something? Anyway, in this mindset, the disabled can't consent because they're "children in adult bodies."
But also, to reiterate, the belief is simultaneously that sex workers can't consent. They're all victims of nefarious dubiously Chinese forces that want to enslave women, or they're victims of poverty (often correct!) who should be dependent on a church to keep them fed and alive (no!), or just whatever. The bottom line is that sex workers are all women, women can never consent to sex, therefore sex workers are all victims and by enabling disabled people to hire sex workers we are feeding innocent women to horrible violent men who are going to Texas up a Chainsaw Massacre in their pussyzones what with their Silence of the Lambs esque Conditions(tm).
It's this double-dehumanization that led to literally nobody winning. The sex workers remain struggling as a regular source of revenue was cut off, apparently solving the whole "forced into it by poverty" problem by exacerbating their poverty, meanwhile every disabeld person who was using sex work to deal with the basic human function of droppin loads was no longer able to drop any goddamn loads due to puritanism.
This is to say nothing of the fact that many sex workers are disabled and many disabled people end up in sex work due to societal realities like poverty and ableism in employment.
In this same country, it is legal to pay a disabled person a small percentage of minimum wage based on an inherently unfair assessment of their ability contrasted to a hypothetical able-bodied worker.
And so,
The disability royal commission is examining the experiences of people who have worked in Australian disability enterprises, as advocates ra
Many of us make far below poverty wages.
That's those of us who can even land a job. Often employers will just not fucking hire you if you have any accommodation requirements whatsoever. The disability pension has not had a meaningful increase in the entire time I have been alive, and I am not young.
This, of course, results in a lot of disabled people, most often women, ending up in sex work. We have "equity adjusted" wages but not "equity adjusted groceries," so before they can buy pork, they gotta swallow hog.
Of course the state entities responsible for all of this know about survival sex and sex work, but again, they ride on the perception that we are all innocent darlings that don't know about sex and can never seek it out. When convenient. Again, we are simultaneously all sexual monsters when it's more convenient to believe that.
So they create this specific bubble of extremely vulnerable sex workers, and then pretend they're not there, while obstructing adjacent systems like unions that would protect them.
It is crazymaking, the intersection of sex work and disability.
The way the NDIS is structured means you basically have to treat it like a job if you want to actually get your needs met. I need an OT for several things and in order to get everything done, they need to bill for about 30 hours of work (some of the assessments are all-day things, and then the rest are for actually writing reports). They can’t accept the job until I confirm I have that. The document I have about my plan don’t say how many hours I can get, just says a total $ amount. So I have to look up what the rates for OTs are (which of course is about to change) and do math to figure out if I have that. I think I do, but I’m not 100% certain because the rules about how I can use the funding keep changing. So I need to call someone to confirm. my LAC I think? But my LAC is only available Monday-Friday 9am-5pm. When I’m working. I work from home so it’s not the end of the world but these phone calls can take hours depending on what we’re discussing.
That’s not even taking those all-day assessments from the OT which are needed to get any funding on my next plan into account. Most OTs have the same work hours too. Also the specialists appointments I need to confirm my disability effects what I say it does so they’ll even look at the OT’s report, and everything else. so I’ll likely end up loosing at least a few days of work at least by the end of it all. Oh and if you don’t do it fast enough they take the funding for the OT away because, “well you’re not using it”.
And then the gov complains about how too many of us “don’t want to work” and are on DSP? How do you expect us to hold down normal jobs when you keep making us jump through all these ridiculous hoops that can only be done during work hours?? You can only take so many days off and answer so many calls on the job before your employer starts getting the shits with you, even if they’re legally not supposed to. Again, I work from home and the only people I need to answer to right now are commission clients who are generally very understanding, but even that’s hard to balance with all this stuff when I need big adjustments done to my plan. The closest thing I’ve had to normal jobs have all been with specifically disability orgs who are understanding of this, but when all your employees have to jump through the same hoops every year it gets hard to manage. They’re understanding but they still need staff to cover shifts. And what about those of us with full-time jobs outside of the disability sector? A lot of people I know end up using up their holiday time to sort all this out.
I’m not ranting just to rant, I keep seeing people not on the NDIS, people who don’t know any disabled people or are the friend of someone’s niece’s husband who’s disabled, complaining about how easy the system is to rort as an NDIS participant but they have no idea what the system is actually like to navigate. And this is all just if everything goes smoothly, it usually doesn’t and then you have to spend weeks, months or longer fighting with them to fix it, usually by getting more input from OTs, Specialists, and other stuff that all takes time and often our own money. It’s not some get-rich-quick scheme, we don’t even get the money directly. It’s locked up and has to be approved before we can even use it, and it can only be used on increasingly specific things.
Honestly for anybody who can afford it and who still believes in psychiatric responses to systemic problems, please donate to Lifeline because I'm beyond certain that there are at least 160,000 people calling tonight.
For everyone else, please e-mail your local federal MP and tell them removing participants off the NDIS with no non-profit support services available to non-NDIS participants offering sufficient levels of care is a disgrace. As a participant who's primary disability is psychosocial, there are no services available to me which compare to what I recieve on the NDIS. There are short term programs, usually based on capacity building to independence. That's not what I need. I've been adequately treated for my condition and my brain is still fucking toast 🙃
I also have a secondary condition that is physical which the NDIS is trying to deny that I met access for, but that's another story. Presently I still recieve support for that condition. The entire reason I used my psychosocial disability to gain access was because I needed support for my physical disability. I will still need support for that condition if I'm removed from the NDIS on the basis of having a primary disability that is psychosocial. There is no support for me that comes close to what is available through the NDIS and being on disability pension in a cost of living crisis? I can't afford it. I'll regress. My mum will get carer burnout. My quality of life will severely deteriorate.
There are 160,000 of us in this boat. Do not let disabled people become scapegoats for a government that won't hold tax evading large corporations accountable, and won't hold themselves accountable for underestimating the amount of disabled people who would need support from the scheme, and failing to provide enough oversight to providers.
