The Rhinoceros In The Room?

Below is a small extract from a longer work from ERI, a company in the business of selling employment data, particularly what they regard as a replacement for the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) (Emphasis added).

Each month the eDOT Skills Project [one of ERI's products] collapses DOT jobs no longer found in the economy into remaining eDOT data (so that historic data is not lost and we don’t inadvertently, as we have and corrected, eliminate a job like “chicken debeaker” which still exists in the American economy). It should come as no surprise that unskilled, sedentary jobs are disappearing. The joke among PAQ [part of ERI, apparently] analysts is that the only unskilled, sedentary job to remain in America is the “DOT Killer.” [I think they are referring to those they accuse of wanting to destroy the DOT.] But you can’t joke about your opposition. As opponents, the “study of specific work” has politicians desiring to be reelected, executive administrations wishing to hide unacceptable unemployment rates, a major user group – career planning, admittedly finding the O*NET a superior alternative, a judicial system where pain and emotion are appealing compared to fact (the latter being appealable), an SSA focused on “studying the problem,” vocational experts who believe labor economic data is an “art not a science,” and a legal system where attorneys are magnificently compensated under the status quo.

If this makes little sense to you, let me try to give a little background. Social Security is denying tens of thousands of disability claims each year based upon the premise that there are many unskilled sedentary jobs in the economy. Social Security's evidence for the existence of these unskilled sedentary jobs is the DOT, which said that there were, but the DOT has not been updated in decades and is terribly out of date. ERI is saying that they have evidence that these unskilled sedentary jobs no longer exist. If they are right, tens of thousands of disability claimants are being denied improperly each year. ERI is saying that a lot of people have incentives to ignore this problem.