People with serious mental illnesses (SMI) are less likely than others to be employed, leaving many dependent on paltry public benefits. Among those with any sort of disability, the unemployment rate is, on average, twice as high as that for people without a disability. For people with SMI, the unemployment rate is consistently measured to be around 75–85 per cent. With the arrival of technological advances that characterise the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ – specifically digitalisation, Artificial Intelligence and robotics – and with changing ‘essential skills’ needed to compete in the workforce, there is little reason to expect those numbers to improve.
In 2022, the Brookings Institute repeated the prediction from its similar 2016 report that the jobs most likely to be automated are those that are regular, routinised and technical, jobs that do not require a great deal of thought or innovation to be successfully navigated – factory and production jobs being paradigmatic among these. This was recently reiterated in the New York Times. While many of these types of jobs have already been automated, with the emergence of new smart technologies a new tier of human jobs is becoming less essential. The middle manager, executive assistant and any number of clerical positions can now be functionally performed by programmes without companies’ having to take on the expense of human labour. These technologies ‘free up’ companies from paying for those positions and ‘save’ workers from what David Graeber identified as Bullshit Jobs – jobs that are essentially meaningless, unnecessary and soul-sucking. Moreover, since at least 2016, the World Economic Forum has been bringing attention to the ongoing shift in labour preparation that emphasises constant learning, agile cognitive ability, relentless upskilling and well-developed ‘soft skills’. The same trends continue to hold true today. These skills – whether cognitive or interpersonal – are precisely those with which people with SMI tend to struggle, pushing good jobs even further out of reach.
While the optimistic view may be that workers will be ‘liberated’ from drudgery and free to pursue other opportunities, what if there are no other such opportunities? While much energy is focused on what to do with displaced white-collar workers – and something of a return of blue-collar romanticism is taking place – there will not likely be space for people with SMI in whatever comes next. For those who are unable to take advantage of whatever is developed, what will replace the income from their lost jobs? While the debate about the pros and cons of various types of Guaranteed Basic Income rumbles on, people with SMI have long had access to a basic income of sorts in the form of disability benefits, and for this group at least, while those benefits provide the bare bones of financial security, much is still lacking.*
And work does more than simply bring in income every month. What about the loss of social connections and other non-financial benefits of work? In The Last Human Job, Allison Pugh gives the example of automated checkout systems that displace grocery clerk positions, reporting that these new systems erase opportunities for meaningful conversations with customers – a form of connective labour that allows even routine and simple labour a space for developing meaningful social relationships – a central work-related outcome for those isolated through disability. Even bullshit jobs may be better than staying at home alone, particularly for people who are more likely than others to live alone, and to struggle with relationships. The gold standard-supported employment model for people with SMI is Individual Placement and Support (IPS). In fact, IPS has shown little, if any, capacity to improve financial security, mitigate long-term poverty or lower unemployment in the aggregate among people with SMI, but it does have great therapeutic value, likely due to the non-financial benefits of the mostly low-waged jobs it manages to get people into.
I am not arguing here that work is a ‘right’ or that it’s the government’s job to serve as an ‘employer of last resort’ and provide employment for the unemployed (these arguments may not be unreasonable, but are certainly not feasible in the near future) or that everyone who wants to work should be able to (this is obviously not the case – some people have disabilities that prevent them from working, even in a fully accommodating work environment). But it is the case that many people with SMI are capable of work and want to work. But the jobs they are most able to hold are precisely those that are either being automated and/or are likely to become more and more competitive.
In the absence of a Guaranteed Basic Income which, despite the proliferation of pilot projects and research studies, will likely not materialise for some time if at all, we will likely see an increase in applicants for disability benefits as jobs become automated. Research has shown that applications increase during periods of high unemployment, revealing the contingent nature of what we think of as ‘disability’. That designation, in the context of the United States’ benefits system, is only partly related to a person’s disabling condition per se; it is also related to the availability of jobs at any moment in time that will accept such a person. Regardless, an increase in benefits applications will likely also lead to an increase in stigmatising attitudes towards these non-workers, particularly those with psychiatric disabilities, whose disability is usually less visible. It is the American cultural orientation to blame and judge the benefits recipient who appears able to work, rather than to take stock of the deep structural and social conditions that produce not disability but antipathy towards those who do not appear impaired, and fail to provide meaningful ways for people to occupy their days outside formal paid employment.
Kendall Atterbury has an interdisciplinary academic background that includes study in political theory and theological studies (MA, MTS), and social work (MSW, PhD). She is an affiliate of Yale School of Medicine’s Program for Recovery and Community Health.
*importantly, a diagnosis of SMI on its own is not automatically disabling.
Image credit Stewart Munro via Unsplash