Autism News, 2014/03/09

Great news! Last news post, ASAN and other disability rights organizations were campaigning for President Obama to include disabled workers working on 14(c) certificates in his increase to the federal contractor minimum wage. Those efforts paid off, and “sheltered workshops” employed by the U.S. federal government will now have to pay their workers the same wages as everyone else.

Obama’s minimum wage increase was only for a specific sector of the U.S. economy, though. Sheltered workshops in the private sector are still allowed to pay disabled workers less than a dollar per hour. ASAN and the other groups who achieved this are now hoping to have section 14(c) repealed altogether, so that the minimum wage throughout the U.S. will apply to everyone, abled and disabled.

In other news, the US’s Combating Autism Act is up for re-authorization. This act is more or less what the name implies: a research funding bill in which the vast majority of funded research aims to create a world without autistic people, not to help existing autistic people with the services they actually need. More details from ASAN here. You can also check out the hashtag #StopCombatingMe on Twitter.

Life issues:

  • S.E. Smith on why disability rights and caregivers’ rights should not be in opposition to each other. (The article is mostly about people who work professionally as caregivers, but a great deal of this also applies to disability parents and other family member caregivers.)
  • Saintgloria on social networks
  • Joeymom on parenting a child who is known to wander

Intersectionality:

Sad Things:

  • March 1 was an official day of remembrance for disabled people who are murdered by their caregivers. (Yes, there are that many.) If you forgot to mark the date on March 1, you might like to take a moment to look at Autism Memorial.
  • Avonte Oquendo, the autistic boy from my last news post who died after wandering away from school, is still in the news. People are talking about ways to prevent further deaths through the use of tracking bracelets and other forms of control; Lisa Daxer explains why it’s not that simple.
  • Also, here is a very interesting conversation from Tumblr about self-diagnosis and substance abuse.