Yesterday I submitted ten kilo of drawings, technical description, contracts and dozens of other documents required for permitting a meat factory. Everything was all right and I paid the municipal tax, then the bureaucrat in charge pointed to a large signpost on the wall "No submissions will be processed unless signed by a registered xpert in handicapped access". I had always designed special wheelchair toilets for public places, but this is something new. I protested that no handicapped person will work in a meat factory and the public will not be allowed in, but laws are laws and that it was.
(Later I talked to a friendly higher up bureaucrat, an exception was made and the permit is being processed.)
The point is that Israel is starting to enforce seriously the anti-discriminatory building laws. That means additional large toilets (building space is very expensive in Israel) and long sloped ramps, adding some 5% to building costs. My country club's swimming pool has installed mechanic chairs for the handicapped. There are talking facilities for the blind (new lifts have Braille control panels) and many other related subjects. This is a speciality that slowly is gaining momentum and the reason is different from the American one, which is lawsuits against discrimination. Here, I think, the reason is that simply the quality of the population is worsening fast. In the streets one sees more and more disabled people and I mean old people in wheelchairs with a Phillippine caretaker pushing them, more morbidly obese people circulating on electric cars, and more terribly disfigured people that I have never seen before, and so on. Apparently Israel is preparing itself to a largely handicapped population and that may include expected additions resulting from the coming wars.
9 comments:
I wouldn't draw too many broad conclusions from this. The US has had handicapped access requirements for years and I assume most advanced countries have similar requirements. I think in connection with the Olympics, a lot of the new infrastructure in China was even made handicapped accessible.
This seems to be a very common obsession of the liberal state along with environmentalism, etc. Sometime the regulations are enforced stupidly. You are lucky. For example in the US the # of handicapped only parking spaces is in proportion to the total # of spaces in your parking lot and must be placed closest to the store entrance (the best spots). We have in the US large self service building supply stores such as "Home Depot" and "Lowes" which have hundreds of parking spaces. Naturally physically handicapped people do not do much shopping at building supply stores- if you are handicapped you cannot load lumber, pipes, etc. into a vehicle. But the law is the law so in front of every Home Depot several dozen of the best parking spaces are reserved for the handicapped and are almost always empty, waiting for handicapped customers who will never come. Meanwhile the tradesmen have to park further away. If every tradesman has to walk 1 minute further to his car and you multiply this by hundreds of tradesmen at hundreds of stores, then many thousands of hours are wasted every years by this stupid regulation.
In principle, it is a very highminded law to provide equal access to handicapped people and I am for it. The issue is that building and labor codes are enforcing this equality blindly, regardless the cost relative the number of handicapped people it benefits. I dont see why a meat factory, which is a dangerous place, should be re-designed for wheelchairs. Life is unfair. Maybe handicapped people should not work in a slaughterhouse or a chorizo factory, or blind people should not pilot airplanes or drive tractors.
I understand that society is becoming wealthier and more compassive, and strives to extend equality to everybody. But this intensive and rigorous enforcement in Israel is something new, and I think that it is the desire to be like America is pushing it ahead, but on the other hand, the growing proportion of the population that is handicapped is another factor. It would be interesting to have some projections of the number of handicapped as society ages and more very sick people survives and more people with severe birth defects survive.
BTW, Palin's attack on Emmanuel for saying "retarded" is worrying. Is the current push toward equal rights being extended to the retarded? Should they be accepted in Harvard according to their proportion in the general population? This thing has no limits. We shall end like Rome, where a horse was elected Senator.
See this link and read the 3rd paragraph under "other Information".
http://www.justice.gov/oarm/jobs/attorneyvotingoarm2010.htm
This is no joke. This is an actual job posting by the US Government. They are apparently seeking Trial Attorneys who are mentally retarded or mentally ill.
My wife works with students (of all ages) who are "learning disabled" or what used to be called dyslexic - although they are of average intelligence they have specific problems reading or mixing up numbers. Once upon a time such students would have been fallen off the academic track due to poor grades but in the modern regime they are given special benefits - extra time to take standardized tests, etc. and allowed to proceed to higher education. My wife had one student who had made it all the way thru medical school despite a strong tendency to scramble numbers. My wife had to strongly encourage her to enter a research field that would not involve patient contact - with her disability, she could have easily mixed up a dosage of a drug and killed someone.
Supposedly under the law employers are only required to hire people who are capable of doing the work "with reasonable accommodations" so blind pilots are out. But for example, in the case of a blind lawyer, it might be a "reasonable accommodation" for an employer to be required to hire a person to read every word to the blind lawyer (the cost of the reader to be at the employer's expense). There are also ridiculous questions of what constitutes protected disability - for example mental illness, so you might have to hire someone who is (truly) crazy (but temporarily capable of doing the work) and if you refuse to they can sue you.
These highminded principals are lovely but they constitute a drag on the economy - someone (all of us) has to pay for all these often little used ramps, etc. If these things were truly in a business's interest (e.g. they had a lot of potential handicapped customers), they would do them on their own without the need for legal mandates. Such mandates are a double drag on the economy - they create a whole industry of bureaucrats to enforce them and consultants to prepare the papers for the bureaucrats - all of these people should be doing productive work like making chorizo instead of shuffling papers to run up construction costs for business.
K
K
Not just Home Depot: my kickboxing gym has handicapped spots that are never used.
If the antidiscriminatory logic is applied le-chumra ie to its extreme, then personnel selection becomes a joke. A person can sue a supermarket for not employing him/her because he/she is a convicted cleptomaniac.
Regarding reserved parking spaces, here in Israel we have several thousand war disabled. I personally know several who hide their permits and never use reserved parkings. On the other hand, there is a full cottage industry of falsifying permits.
You can count on anything that has been turned into a legal right to be applied l'chumra at least some of the time - this is one of the two natural direction of law from the days of Hillel and Shammai (the other being a current of conciliation and common sense - the School of Hillel, or as Lincoln referred to it, "the better angels of our nature"). This is rooted in the overall human tendency toward fanaticism and literalism which is somehow hardwired into our brains and is seen in all societies at one time or another - if a little is good, then more is better and a LOT more is the best(so you go from scarf to veil to burka, from capitalism to socialism to the Year Zero). Then you add to it the fact that there is money to be made by lawyers, etc. from pushing the law in the l'chumra direction and you can be sure of it, and indeed there have been many absurd decisions under the ADA.
K
Dear J,
I'm a journalist writing about koshering salt in Israel's groundwater. I saw you have written about this issue on your blog, and I'd love to speak to you. I live in Jerusalem. Would you please drop me a line?
Thanks very much,
Daniella
daniella [dot] cheslow [at] gmail [dot] com
I did.
Hi J - Can you send another message? I didn't seem to get it. Thanks.
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