Recently in the online adult autistic community there has been a fare amount of discussion about employment and the challenges of not only getting a job when you’re autistic but also keeping your job.  For someone with 3 university degrees and an extensive knowledge of Information Management across multiple disciplines my work history is abysmal.

I can honestly say I’ve been gainfully employed from the age of 20 to 45 for roughly 90% of the time.  If I wasn’t working I was studying and occasionally I was unemployed but I would avoid if humanly possible claiming unemployment benefit and live off my savings.  In my 25 years of employment I have never been fired but I’ve also never stayed in one job for longer than 2 years. I’ve had jobs that paid minimum wage, jobs where you’re paid x amount per y number of items you box, jobs that are casual so I could earn $900 a fortnight or $0 a fortnight, jobs that paid $40, 000, jobs that paid $60, 000 and jobs that paid $120,000 per year. Sometimes I worked on short term contract and sometimes I was a full time employee. I have literally searched through and applied for thousands of jobs in my 25 year working history.

Know what I’ve NEVER seen advertised are jobs specifically aimed at someone who is autistic. I’ve also never seen the word AUTISTIC FRIENDLY EMPLOYER anywhere ever nor as far as I can tell are there any employment agents or agencies who specialise in helping autistic people find employment or teach employers what AUTISTIC FRIENDLY WORKSPACES actually are.

All the people who work in “disability support” will read that and jump up and down shouting there are LOTS of places who specifically hire autistic employees. What they aren’t saying is that those employment placements specifically for autistic employees are for the autistics who have intellectual disabilities and the jobs are in shelter workshops not real workplaces.

For high functioning independent autistic adults like me the lack of employment support has meant a lifetime of changing jobs because of the stress of all the other shit that’s not part of my job like office politics, noise levels and the dreaded “other duties” I can only cope with for a certain period of time before I get sick from stress.  For some autistic adults it’s meant going down the rabbit hole of drugs, alcohol to self medicate that tragically often leads to unemployment and homelessness. Others stay in a job they hate making themselves sick from stress and watching as new employees far less qualified than them climb the corporate ladder because the autistic employee isn’t viewed as a “team player”. And for a lot of us it means we are both under employed and under valued by employers, which over an adults working life span can do huge amounts of damage to mental health, self esteem and physical health.

However the real tragedy is not how autistic adults are currently viewed by employers or society it’s the fact we’re setting an entire generation of autistic children up to fail at being independent autistic adults.  Right now just about all the resources, programs, support and funding to help autistic people is for children and their families.  However in the next 5 to 15 years all those autistic children are going to graduate school, trade collage or university and attempted to go into the workforce. At this point they will discover that there is literally no such thing as “autistic friendly employers” so they have to compete with everyone else to get a job.  If they actually manage to get through the application and rounds of interviews they will discover that not one person in their workplace gives a flying fuck about the fact they are autistic. Their boss is not going to let them wear noise cancelling headphones, no they can’t have an office with a door they like everyone else will be in the horrid cubs of death open office space, no they can’t be excused from team building activities and yes they will do that it’s called “other duties”.

So unless the current model of funding and support for autistic people changes to include independent autistic adults and the issues they face with employment, housing and life in general the government will have wasted literally millions of dollar because the kids they t trying to teach to be “normal” will never end up fulling integrating into society as a productive employed independent autistic adult!