Remote Work And Disability

     From Does Remote Work Help Older People With Disabilities? by Siyan Liu and Laura D. Quinby, a study for the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College:

...The shift to remote work that started during COVID and has persisted may have improved job prospects for older people with disabilities by reducing barriers to employment. Consistent with this view, this brief finds that nearly all of the post-pandemic employment gain for older people with disabilities has been in teleworkable occupations, and this pattern holds even after controlling for other factors. Remote work benefits older workers with disabilities by allowing some to reenter the labor force and others to switch jobs instead of exiting work. ...

      Let's remember that whatever benefits there are to disabled people from remote work can only help a part of the disabled population. It doesn't help blue collar workers. People who work in offices, such as most of the people reading this blog, may not be aware that most workers don't work in offices and don't hold jobs that allow remote work.

Bill To Cut Social Security Funding Advances

     From Government Executive:

The House Appropriations Committee voted along party lines Wednesday to advance appropriations legislation that would cut the Social Security Administration’s administrative budget by $450 million next fiscal year. ...

During Wednesday’s committee markup, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., who will retire at the end of this year, filed an amendment restoring the $450 million in cuts, which would bring SSA’s funding flat with its current annual appropriation of $14.2 billion. He warned that, if enacted, the GOP’s proposed cuts would further exacerbate the agency’s customer service crisis. ...

Rep. Robert Aderlholt, R-Ala., who chairs the subcommittee responsible for the bill, defended the cuts, claiming that they would only affect headquarters staff and not any field offices.

“Despite what you may have heard, no field offices will be closed because of this bill,” Aderholt said. “The 4% cut to SSA would come from the $3 billion that Social Security has budgeted for its Baltimore and Washington, D.C., offices, where 61% of the workforce is fully remote. SSA’s mission is customer-facing and it serves America’s most vulnerable population and this egregious use of telework is insulting to them.”

But Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Aderholt’s assurances ring hollow.

“Now, the chairman says that no field offices will close,” he said. “Why does he say that? Because he directs, in the bill, that ‘no field offices will be closed.’ Poof, magic! He didn’t ask SSA whether that would be, he just directed it in the bill . . . The population keeps going up, and the senior population certainly keeps going up, and your assertion that somehow the expenditures to service those rising numbers is static is incorrect. Your math doesn’t work.”

Ruppersberger’s amendment failed by a 31-23 vote.

Lauren Boebert Is An Ass -- But You Already Knew That

     From The Hill:

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) argued with a Social Security official over claims of backlogs in a Wednesday hearing about post-pandemic teleworking policies.

Boebert asked Oren “Hank” McKnelly, an executive counselor for the Social Security Administration, if the administration monitored its employees’ output and hours if workers are logging on from home.

 McKnelly assured Boebert social security employees are “subjected to the same performance management processes” whether they are teleworking or working from the office. ...

“We have systems in place that our managers use to schedule, assign and track workloads,” McKnelly said, adding that if employees work virtually, they must be responsive to various forms of communication.

Boebert continued, asking the official why the backlog of social security applicants has increased from 41,000 to 107,000.

“We’ve been historically underfunded for a number of years now,” McKnelly fired back, to which the congresswoman disagreed.

McKnelly said in the past 10 years, the administration has seen an increase of more than 8 million beneficiaries and experienced the lowest staffing levels ever at the end of fiscal 2022.

“That’s a math problem,” he said. “If you have those workloads increasing and you don’t have the staff to take care of those workloads, you’re going to have the backlogs that you’re talking about, representative.” ...