Alternatively, anybody know what the situation is like for disabled people in China? Resources for that would be good to read, too.
Alternatively, anybody know what the situation is like for disabled people in China? Resources for that would be good to read, too.
[Edit] High effort post warning: I did a dive into a few sources, into the economic perspectives for people with disabilities in the USSR, with a small final discussion on my part at the end, the discussion being divided into two comments. The first source is in Spanish (since I'm from Spain myself) but I translated it to English below.
I happened to stumble upon a pamphlet called "Lo que recibe el trabajador soviético además de su salario" (what the Soviet worker receives beside their salary), from 1959, written by A. Zveriev, the then minister of finance of the USSR. Please note that it uses contemporarily wrong-sounding words to refer to people with disabilities, such as "inválido" (which translates to something like non-valid, I've translated it to "disabled" in English for the text), which was the normal term back in the day in the Spanish-speaking world to refer to people with disabilities. Since then, the term first evolved to "minusválido" (less-valid), and contemporarily to "persona con discapacidad" (person with disability). In the section dedicated to social security, it briefly says:
Translated to English:
So basically, it seems that people with disabilities that prevented them from working, were treated as pensioners, earning a pension proportional to how long they've worked and their salary during working years. Additionally, from the text:
Or, in English:
From this, and the part before where it says that "a peculiarity is the high level of assistance it guarantees to workers and employees and their families", I deduce that by talking with the union representatives in case of a disabled family member as a worker, it would be possible to have access to some form of extra income, but I admit this is just my assumption. [1/2]
Also relevant to the discussion, are some fragments from the book "Human rights in the Soviet Union", by Albert Szymanski (which I highly recommend to read). This book is 25 years younger than the former pamphlet, it was published in 1984 so the discussion is more nuanced in the sense that it includes data up to the early 80s. Not specific to people with disabilities, but definitely very important to them, is the following, from the introduction of Chapter 5 on Economic Rights:
Later in the chapter, in the section of "Social Consumption and the Social Wage":
On the section about Healthcare:
On the section about Job Rights:
So, while there's not much in the way of specific discussion regarding people with disabilities, I'll make some commentary.
Of course, the USSR for most of its history was relatively a "developing nation", with the highest levels of material wealth, and therefore material well-being, being achieved mostly during and after the 70s and until the Perestroika. Despite this, the SOCIAL RIGHT to a job for everyone who is capable of working, without any discrimination, and the absolute lack of unemployment (Szymanski: "About 60% of dismissed workers were able to find new employment within ten days of their dismissal"), likely resulted in a majority of people with disabilities that don't prevent them from working being able to find jobs. Since unions that were involved in the process of firing someone from a job, it seems to me highly unlikely that a person with disabilities would be fired from a job just for the sake of it, and the chronic labour shortage of the USSR (by design, in order to maximize the output of the economy and guaranteeing everyone a job), as well as the well-functioning State mechanisms to find people jobs, makes me believe that most people with disabilities were perfectly capable of finding and maintaining a job.
In the case of people with disabilities that rendered them unable to work, it's rather clear to me from the previous pamphlet that they were treated as pensioners. The pamphlet specifically says "disability pensions are determined according to the degree of loss of working capacity". It's likely that these pensions were generally low, especially so during the earlier years of development of the USSR's economy, but it's necessary to keep in mind that the costs of the basics were very heavily subsidized, as the book says, "Housing, medicine, transport and insurance account for an average of 15% of a Soviet family's income". So, while it's likely that many people with disabilities likely relied partially on family members as a supplementary form of income, which isn't ideal, it's absolutely not worse than the case of modern liberal societies, where that absolutely happens (in my experience as a Spanish guy who fortunately enjoys EU levels of social security, I can't imagine how bad it is in the USA).
Furthermore, the RIGHT TO A JOB makes me believe wholeheartedly that it was much more likely for people with disabilities to find a job suited to their capabilities. After all, the form of socialism in the USSR, was "from each according to their work; to each according to their needs". I find this perspective much more humanizing than the systematically high unemployment rates for people with disabilities in capitalist societies, in which even in countries with stronger social security, companies in many cases hire people with disabilities for tax exemptions, or where people who by all means can work many jobs despite some disabilities, are exluded from the job market and relegated to feeling like a social burden by living off a pension.
I understand that this analysis was very economics-focused, and it lacks a lot in the societal sense, architectural design, etc. It would be very interesting to focus on how the public transit-oriented transportation system creates higher mobility for most people with movement impairments, the architectural design (which I have absolutely no idea about), or many other aspects of life for people with disabilities, but unfortunately I can't provide anything else for the time being. Anyway, thanks a bunch for reading, it was a pleasure to write this down. [2/2]
GOOD Post! Thank you!
"Invalid" (with the UK pronunciation, "IN vuh LID") is the old standard term in English, though it's now more or less a slur, just in case you weren't familiar
Yeah I'm not aware of the good terminology in English, I used "person with disabilities" which is a literal translation from Spanish, and I think it works nicely. What do you think?
I think depending on what kind of crowd you're with, "person with disabilities" is the best thing to go with until/unless someone asks for another term to be used. In my experience, the vast majority of people are much more casual about it and say "disabled people," which I think is fine and is personally what I say. For some reason, there's also a rhetorical habit where, when you're talking about disabled people as a segment of society in a slightly grander sense, then they are often referred as "the disabled". I don't know why, and people who are really interested are likely to tell you that it's not ideal for the same reason as saying "blacks" or something.
Anyway, I'm not the person to ask since I'm not really part of that group, but I appreciate that you are seeking out input, so I did my best!
Gotcha, of course the best thing is to listen to people and accommodating, as always. Thanks a bunch :)