(Originally posted for The Voice of Heard on
January 1, 2013)
For over five years, I have worked part time at Goretti’s, a local
supermarket in my hometown of Millbury, with a minimum wage of $7.50 an hour.
Besides bagging groceries, my tasks also include sweeping up the
floor, putting baskets back into the lobby, vacuuming the lobby, removing
carriages from the parking lot, disposing of trash and cardboard into their
respective compactors, tending to the recycling machines, and returning
unwanted items to their respective aisles. Although I am capable of more
advanced tasks than this, I have not been able to bring myself to look
for a higher paying job that would make use of them. Even though I
have reading and writing skills refined from years of college, this
blog, and an increasing personal library of books here at home, there is
one obstacle that I have yet to overcome: communicating with other people in a
way that would allow me to make sense to those other people. That is because I
have my autism, a social psychological condition which makes communication
and social interaction among other people different from people without it
(generally referred to as “neurotypicals” in most autism circles) and decidedly
more difficult, which ranges based on severity. Most people diagnosed with
autism are generally unemployed because of their difficulty communicating with
other people and understanding unwritten social rules and norms which most
people take for granted. In my case, I still live with my parents even after
graduating from high school in 2006 and college in 2011. I generally depend on
them with college finances, driving, having a roof over my head, and so forth.
As I plan on finding my way out of this difficulty, I have
read two articles on the potential economic advantage of some autistic
individuals with latent talents which give them an advantage over most
people. One is a New
York Times article written a few months ago. It talks about a Danish
consulting firm called Specialisterne (Danish for “the
specialists”) that employs specific autistic adults who could not only “hold
down a job but also be the best [people] for it.” It is founded by Thorkil
Sonne, a former technical director at a spin-off of TDC, Denmark’s largest
communications company. His son, Lars, was diagnosed with autism at age 3,
has displayed intense focus and careful execution in his activities, which were
exactly the qualities that Sonne “often looked for in his own employees.”
The
other is a research paper about a possible economic approach to understanding
autism written by Tyler Cowen, an economics professor from George Mason
University. The paper analyzes the difference between autistics and
non-autistics in terms of specialization in production and consumption,
rational judgements, and the cognitive biases of non-autistics that affects the
role of autistics in the workforce.
These articles bring an economic perspective to the table in
addition to psychology, psychiatry, genetics, and sociology in the overall
study of autism. Although I am not as good with memorization, mathematics in
the head, and focus as the other autistics mentioned in the articles, the
relative study of autism based on economics gives me an incentive to find my
way into the workforce dominated by neurotypicals whom I predict will be
turned off by my difficult communication skills and limited understanding of
social etiquette, overlooking my specialties that could greatly contribute to
business at a company I may wind up working for in the future and, if possible,
the local economy.
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