No Help Wanted- Employing Disabled Workers

No Help Wanted


In 1990, the revolutionary Title 1 of the Americans With Disabilities act protected employees with disabilities from discriminatory hiring practices.

Half a century earlier, there was a ten minute educational short telling employers that it was okay to hire disabled World War 1 veterans.

The film starts with the most whimsical look at factory life since Modern Times.

Amputees are statistically less likely to get a limb stuck in
the machinery.

Workers line up to stamp their time card, except one of them has
prosthetic hands. It's only been a minute and eight seconds since the short started and already I can tell you the moral: "Just because a man has a disability doesn't mean he can't be a wage slave."

Look, he can light a cigarette. That was totally a spontaneous action and wasn't scripted to draw attention to him being able to do things

They use an example of a little girl who lost her baby teeth and has trouble eating certain foods until her adult teeth grow in. This is analogous to amputees who have trouble doing certain things until their new limbs grow in.

Now an amputee is thinking about people with disabilities who became movie stars,baseball players, and bank managers. Another good message: people with disabilities are worthwhile as long as they do something successful.

There's a strange section in which the value of a worker is distributed across  his body parts. I think that was in Capital somewhere.

I just want to point out that this film is marketed incorrectly. The subtitle is "employing disabled workers", but the movie uses "you" to refer to the worker. Shouldn't the title speak to the worker, not the employer?

The narrator claims that the disabled worker needs no special training. I guess that the government rehab program the film just depicted doesn't count as special training?

Not special training

Apparently the second handicap is people who think a disabled man is a liability in an industry. I'm glad that this movie is addressing the ableism in accounting. It's great to know that a disabled worker is a valuable asset instead of a liability to the company.


Except he isn't.

Labor is considered an expense in accounting.





                 Assets = Liabilities + (Revenue-Expenses)  + Common Stock - Dividends

Remember, a disabled worker is not a liability. He is an expense. Such a humanizing message.


The narrator claims that "In the right job, handicapped men earn more money...than the normal worker." This movie is trying to convince employers to hire people with disabilities. Saying that people with disabilities have higher wages is working against that message.

So we know that men with disabilities can have an idealized mid-century work environment. But can he have an idealized mid-century home life?

Yes he can

In conclusion, this film was amazing. I'm impressed that the people back in the 1940s recognized that capitalists could also exploit people with disabilities.

This related video on the side bar looks much more interesting by the way,