Autistic employees being underpaid

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When someone with autism is employed they always seem to work hard and don’t get paid much for it. I read somewhere that employers can pick up on that fact that the autistic employee is only doing the job benefit of the work and not the money. I also think employers are discriminating against autistic employees by paying them less than non autistic employees.

Why is this? We are not stupid. We want to have jobs same as everyone else and be treated same as everyone else.

Anyone have experiences of this?

Disclosure: I am a sociologist with a concentration in the areas of employment and autistic adults.

I am not aware of a scientific way that this could be studied. There would have to be a database somewhere that collected the location, industry, job, and autism status (yes/no) of a large number of people. There may be something with disability yes/no, but I personally don't think that would be helpful.

There are qualitative, or essentially anecdotal studies that suggest that autistic people are taken advantage of more often by their employers, especially if the employers know that the employees are on the spectrum. But since autistic people also tend to err on the side of negativity with the intentions of others, we don't know that this is accurate.

Higher professional level autistic people often do not disclose that they are autistic. They may not know themselves.

There is a perception that an autistic employee is a person sweeping the floor at a McDonald's somewhere, or an engineer crunching numbers. The truth, as far as I have found in my research, is that autistic people are employed in all industries and at all levels. We do not have much data as to their treatment, compensation, daily work life, or how they are seen by their peers, employees, or employers. I was going to work on that, but I had to bow out from research to attend my ADHD son. He needs less care now, so maybe I will jump back in.

My best guess is that I think there would be differences in how autistic employees were compensated overall that non-autistic employees. Any company will only pay a person as much as they will accept to keep working. But some companies will also give vacation time, insurance benefits, fewer work tasks in exchange for higher quality tasks, flexible schedules, informal authority over policies and procedures, and other perks that are harder to calculate.

For example, imagine that Employee A makes 70,000/year but spends 7 full hours per day actively doing work, with one hour a day gossiping, checking their phone, using the bathroom, etc, and then there are lunch and breaks like normal. Employee B makes 65,000/year but spends 1 hour actively doing work. The rest of the time is spent quietly goofing off. Administration knows this and goes along, because Employee B still outperforms Employee A. I have personally seen this many times with autistic workers. I have also seen this scenario with the autistic employee making more than the harder working person.

Sorry for the long post. I find this highly interesting.

If you think you are being paid less than employees doing the same job you are doing, then why don't you bring a civil action for discrimination?

It has definately been my experience in some jobs I have had.

TBH, that's often times easier said than done. You have to know about it to even try and even if you do know about it, the system is rigged against us. In the US, you only get 180 days to bring action under the ADA and it can be rather hard to know when the clock started ticking.

There's also the issue that you have to be able to tie it to a specific ADA covered condition and if it's a matter of them negotiating when you didn't, it can be an extra challenge to explain why you didn't negotiate it when they did.

I do think that the more civil suits to arise from this the better, but the entire thing is stacked against us from the beginning and it has to be pretty egregious to actually result in any wins.

And then there's the issue of burning bridges which many of us can't really afford to do as it can be extremely hard to get a new job, especially if you can't get a reference from the company because you sued them.

I would like to discuss this with my boss. My employer doesn't want to pay the full salary, so he wants 50 % of the salaray from the Social Affairs. Otherwise, he wants to fire me. For this trick he and a corrupt doctor arranged a learning disorder behind my back.

The real reason is that my employer has financial issues. The money that he gets from Social Affairs is not going to help me, but is used for fixing financial problems generally. I know, my employer wastes a lot of money, which could be avoided by better management. I made some proposals, but of course they are all rejected. "Don't fix it, if it ain't broken!" With that mindset, we would not be using Windows, Excel and Word, but a typewriter and an old non-scientific calculator instead.

In the UK, you'd need to win enough compensation to retire on, because no employer would ever look at you again.

Ditto. I'd go as far as to say that once upon a time, particularly in the 1980s when I started out, there was a sneaky form of discrimination by job title going on in the computing industry, especially at the junior level. A 'software engineer' in industry would earn considerably less than an 'analyst programmer' in corporate IT, even when they were doing exactly the same job.

What this has to do with autism is that there were many more people in 'engineering' than in 'information technology' who would qualify as autistic, though of course back then we were almost all undiagnosed and unaware. The only difference in the positions at the junior level was that the IT roles had an expectation (though no element) of promotion to management, where the engineering jobs didn't.

For quite a few years I tried to avoid having 'engineer' in my job title. Happily that changed when I'd built up enough skills and experience to work freelance and set my own rate. You can call me what you like now.

sadly i think research and studies confirm that its common for people on the autism spectrum to be either unemployed or just underemployed

I made 15 dollars per hour at only official W2 job and I thought that was pretty good considering I was thinking I would be making min wage or close to it which is 7.25 per hour now.Inflation has gone way up since then so its a even worse wage now that I would not be happy in at all.I guess the corporations would rather spend their money on buybacks and dividends than pay us a living wage sadly.I wish they could do less buybacks and dividends but still pay us a living wage but Wall Street wont allow that.

Big corporations wants to spend their record profits on buybacks and dividends for investors instead of a every worker getting a living wage to live the 1950's American Dream.I was so happy when I made 15 dollars per hour because I thought it would 7.25 per hour.

Please provide links to those studies.

As far as the UK is concerned at least, the Buckland Report confirms these views.

I agree with the burning bridges bit. I am scared to quit my job because finding another job is very difficult for autistic people and finding the right one. I also try to mask at work to avoid getting sacked. It’s like I can’t win.

Sadly this very common for autistic people both in the UK and US. Also more autistics are either quitting jobs or getting fired from jobs due to employers lack of understanding. Very upsetting.

The report gets it spot on and is in line with other organizations that have funded research into the subject of autism and employment in the UK. Only about 3 in 10 autistic folk are in either part-time or full-time employment in the UK, or put another way, 30% of people. 70% of autistic people in the UK are unemployed.