How social security disability law is out of touch with the
contemporary American labor market
Passing down nearly a million decisions each year, more judges handle
disability cases for the Social Security Administration than federal
civil and criminal cases combined.
In Social Security Disability Law and the American Labor Market, Jon
C. Dubin challenges the contemporary policies for determining disability
benefits and work assessment. He posits the fundamental questions: where
are the jobs for persons with significant medical and vocational
challenges? And how does the administration misfire in its standards and
processes for answering that question? Deploying his profound
understanding of the Social Security Administration and Disability law
and policy, he demystifies the system, showing us its complex inner
mechanisms and flaws, its history and evolution, and how changes in the
labor market have rendered some agency processes obsolete. Dubin lays
out how those who advocate eviscerating program coverage and needed life
support benefits in the guise of modernizing these procedures would
reduce the capacity for the Social Security Administration to function
properly and serve its intended beneficiaries, and argues that the
disability system should instead be "mended, not ended."
Dubin argues that while it may seem counterintuitive, the transformation
from an industrial economy to a twenty-first-century service economy in
the information age, with increased automation, and resulting diminished
demand for arduous physical labor, has not meaningfully reduced the
relevance of, or need for, the disability benefits programs. Indeed,
they have created new and different obstacles to work adjustments based
on the need for other skills and capacities in the new
economy--especially for the significant portion of persons with
cognitive, psychiatric, neuro-psychological, or other mental
impairments. Therefore, while the disability program is in dire need of
empirically supported updating and measures to remedy identified
deficiencies, obsolescence, inconsistencies in application, and racial,
economic and other inequities, the program's framework is sufficiently
broad and enduring to remain relevant and faithful to the Act's
congressional beneficent purposes and aspirations.
