Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

She's not alone, however. The sad truth is that the companies that make the most concerted efforts to hire disabled workers (often, as an act of charity) specilize in low-skill, minimum wage jobs.

Egglestone Services (http://www.egglestonservices.org/index.html), centered in Virginia Beach, for example (and whose ads appear on TV, all the time, asking for charitible donations), specializes in training people for the meaningful work of making labels for pill bottles, and doing laundry for one of the local hospitals.

Don't get me wrong, this is important work, and needs to be done by someone.

But it's Eggleston that hires them and then contracts the work out, so the people are stuck in a social ghetto, rather than being mainstreamed into the wider community (and they're in jobs that have very little direct contact with the public). Also, Eggleston sells itself to local businesses as a charity, and that the people the businesses are helping are so grateful to do any work at all that they'll get very high quality for very little cost.

People feel very good about "Supporting" the disabled, as long as we're out of sight...

That, plus the fact that decent mass transit of any sort, much less accessible transportation, is pretty much nonexistant, is it any wonder that uneployment rates among the disabled is 60%?