“The ‘automation bomb’ could destroy 45 percent of the work
activities currently performed in the United States,” David Ignatius in the
Washington Post stated this week, citing a study completed by McKinsey &
Co. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-brave-new-world-of-robots-and-lost-jobs/2016/08/11/e66a4914-5fff-11e6-af8e-54aa2e849447_story.html?utm_term=.8438c964d9ec
Ignatius concluded: “Politicians
need to begin thinking boldly, now, about a world in which driverless vehicles
replace most truck drivers’ jobs, and where factories are populated by robots,
not human beings. The best way to cushion this future is to start planning for
how Americans will be able to take care of their families — and find meaningful
work — in a world where most traditional jobs have vanished.”
One way this “automation bomb” currently impacts Social
Security disability claimants, the most fragile members of the workforce, should
be corrected now.
Two of the five steps in the Social Security disability
evaluation involve jobs. The fourth step
concerns the job(s) that the disabled claimant used to do, and the fifth step, the
potential jobs that the claimant might be able to do.
Social Security finds that if you can do your prior relevant
work, you are not disabled. The Supreme
Court has endorsed the Social Security administration’s position that even if
your job no longer exists, you are not disabled. See, Barnhart
v. Thomas, 540 U.S. 20 (2003). In that case Thomas had been an elevator
operator (prior to the time her job was eliminated), and at the time her case
was considered by Social Security (she applied in 1996), very few elevator
operators’ jobs existed. See http://disabilitydisability.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-grammatical-rule-of-last-antecedent.html
When the sequential analysis moves on to the fifth step, Social
Security considers whether there are a “significant” number of other jobs the
claimant can do. Social Security projects
a 2019 start date for a new system of jobs analysis. See https://www.ssa.gov/disabilityresearch/occupational_info_systems.html
Given the automation crisis, we are now experiencing and
will experience in the future, Social Security law has to change to overturn
the Thomas decision and provide that if
a claimant can do his or her past relevant work, but that the job no longer
exists, the disability evaluation must proceed to the fifth step, rather than
there be an automatic denial at step four.
