The Hidden Reason So Many Autistic Adults Can’t Stay Employed
The Cost of Asking One Person to Do the Work of Five
My grandmother was an exceptionally skilled seamstress.
She built a career on her hands and her eye, not on a personal “brand.” She didn’t need to market herself online, study algorithms, curate an aesthetic, or juggle five different platforms just to be visible. She didn’t do her own accounting, or manage her own PR, or monetize a dozen side hustles just to survive.
She wasn’t wealthy. But when my biological grandfather walked out shortly after my mother was born, her work was enough to keep a roof over their heads. She was hired for her skill, with no degree, no unpaid internships, and no personality tests.
There was no job posting written only for optics while the position was quietly promised to someone internally. A real job existed, and she could do it. She did do it. And she did it well.
But looking back, I’m fairly certain my grandmother was autistic. In her era, however, that wasn’t a diagnosis available to women like her. She was labeled “shy” and “sensitive,” and the conversation stopped there.
Still, she worked. She survived. She raised a child, my mother.
I don’t think the same would be possible for her today, and not because she lacked ability, but because the ground has shifted beneath our feet.
If she were born into today’s world with the same talent for sewing, skill alone wouldn’t be enough, like it had been for her all those years ago. Now, she’d be expected to sew and sell, design and promote, track analytics, manage finances, network constantly, and perform competence in ways that have very little to do with the work itself.
In today’s job market, she might not be considered employable at all.
I suspect this is true because I’ve lived a version of it, myself. And I’m a lot like she was.
Right out of high school, I landed a job as a dog bather at a large chain pet store. It felt like a dream. I had always loved animals, and now I got to work with them all day, every day. I was, like my grandmother, “shy” and “sensitive” (read: undiagnosed autistic). So it felt like an added perk that the job was mostly in the back, away from customers. And I had one job and one job only: to wash dogs.
Despite rather intense sensory overload (wet clothes clinging to my skin, the constant roar of blow dryers, barking echoing off tile walls, the physical strain of bending over tubs all day), I was good at it. I showed up. I did my job. I kept up, for the most part.
About six months in, the job parameters changed.
Management raised productivity quotas that were already hard for me to meet. Not long after this, they announced they were eliminating dog bather positions altogether. Everyone would be trained as a full groomer and would be responsible for bathing and grooming. Quotas were raised yet again.
Corporate didn’t care if this was feasible for the employees. They only cared about getting more output and paying fewer people for it. Let the ones who could handle it rise to the top, let the ones who couldn’t fall away.
What they wanted was growth, not mere stability. Stakeholders don’t like flat lines. They want exponentially climbing curves no matter the human cost.
And I, quite simply, couldn’t keep up anymore.
I had to quit.
Up until that moment, I had been employable. Competent, even. I did my job and I did it well.
Then Corporate slammed their fists on the table like a toddler at dinner time, demanding, “More! MORE!”
And what I’m getting at is this:
This matters when we talk about unemployment, especially the staggering unemployment and underemployment rates among autistic adults, which multiple studies have consistently placed far higher than those of non-disabled peers.
We often frame this as a problem of individual deficits of social skills, adaptability, resilience. What we don’t talk nearly enough about in this conversation is “corporate consolidation and role-stacking” (i.e., forcing one person to do the job of five people while getting paid the salary of one.)
There are countless jobs that I, an autistic person, would excel at if they were still single jobs. Instead, they’ve been folded into Frankenstein positions that demand constant multitasking, social performance, sensory endurance, and emotional labor on top of technical skill, and I am barred from entry.
Also, autistic people tend toward monotropism: deep, sustained focus on a limited number of areas. Far from being a flaw, this is an incredible strength (when it’s allowed to be). It’s what made my grandmother so singularly spectacular at sewing. It’s a different cognitive style, one that has historically produced craftspeople, specialists, analysts, artists, and innovators.
Research also suggests autistic brains process more information at rest, which means cognitive and sensory overload can arrive faster when demands pile up. Layer on interview processes that reward neurotypical socializing rather than actual job competence, and the barriers become structural, not personal.
This is why “inclusion” can’t stop at noise-canceling headphones or written instructions for autistic employees. Those accommodations do matter, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t even begin to touch the core problem.
And that core problem is unfettered greed.
Companies increasingly expect one person to do the work of three, four, or five, not because it’s sustainable, but because it’s profitable in the short term. Their payroll shrinks while their profit rises. Executives are rewarded for math like that. And burnout? Autistic people being shunted out of the rolls of the employed? That’s acceptable collateral damage so long as “LiNe On GrApH gO uP.”
Neoliberal capitalism, as it’s currently practiced, is terrible at long-term thinking. It extracts until systems fail, whether those are natural systems, labor systems, or human bodies and minds, and then looks for something else to extract profit from. People who can’t be optimized for maximum profit are labeled inefficient, expendable, or worse.
Historically, societies that organize themselves this way do not become kinder over time. Disabled people are among the first to be excluded, institutionalized, or erased when profit is the only value that matters. And unfortunately, this isn’t hyperbole. It’s a well-documented pattern across history.
I’m not saying all of this to be nihilistic. I’m saying it because it needs to be said plainly:
If you are autistic and you can’t find, secure, or keep employment, it is not a personal failure. It’s not a you problem.
You would be employable if given the right circumstances. Those “right circumstances” just aren’t profitable for the powers that be, so you’re denied them.
You were not designed to be a hyper-flexible, endlessly multitasking cog in a machine that measures worth solely in quarterly returns. You were designed for depth, not extraction.
When we refuse to acknowledge this, the blame gets handed to the individual. To you, the autistic person.
You internalize it. You start asking yourself why you even exist if you can’t be “productive.” Ask me how I know. I’ve been there a million times before. And that kind of thinking doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s created.
Frankly, it’s cruel.
And what’s so horrific about the cruelty is that it’s not even created out of malice. It’s created out of a complete lack of empathy and consideration.
Where do you think the saying, “it’s just business,” came from?
That’s how harm is justified. “It’s not personal, it’s just business,” really translates to: “You literally don’t even exist to me unless you are turning a profit for me.”
It’s not like corporate CEOs have meetings where they brainstorm new ways to personally punish autistic people. It’s worse than that.
They don’t think about autistic people at all.
They stopped thinking about autistic people the moment autistic people were not able to rise to the occasion of handling the work of multiple roles at once for the same level of pay.
First, the system narrows the definition of employability until many disabled people no longer fit inside it. Then it tells us that our exclusion is our own fault. “Well, you just weren’t able to rise to the occasion. Not my fault.”
And I’m just saying that we should not accept this story. Let this be the one time the victor doesn’t get to write the history books. Because more often than not, the victor is a cheat, and a liar.
“It’s not personal, it’s just business,” is a lie.
It is personal when your decisions disenfranchise millions of people and condemn them to poverty and uncertainty, when your decisions deny people the right to human dignity.
We don’t need more autistic people breaking themselves to fit broken systems. We need systems that allow everyone to contribute in the ways that they are able.
And until I see companies actually doing this, I do not want to hear a single one of them claim to be inclusive.
Millions of autistic people do not need to be unemployed. This isn’t something that has to happen. It’s something that’s decided upon by a system that puts profit over people, always.
I truly believe that millions of autistic people didn’t used to be unemployed, back when a job was a job and not ten jobs in a trench coat.
We are not unemployed because we are unemployable.
We are unemployed because we are the first to buckle under exploitation.
And we’re something else.
We’re the canaries in the coal mine.
First, it’s us. Then, it’s the neurotypicals, once their own thresholds have been exceeded.
How far are we going to take this? How long are we going to pretend this is normal or okay?
I don’t have the answers for how to stop the runaway train that is neoliberal capitalism.
But I, at the very least, want to let you know, as an autistic person, that it’s not your fault that train left you behind on the tracks to fend for yourself.
Don’t let them gaslight you into thinking it’s your fault.
It’s not.
And it never was.
I swear you wrote that about my own experience; it’s so sadly accurate. I am a year and a half in of being unemployed and no prospects on the horizon nor does anything sound remotely sustainable upon description. I don’t know where that leaves us in a place in society right now and the foreseeable future. I usually have such little hope these days, but knowing I’m not alone in these experiences helps a great deal. Thank you for your writing.
An iteration of this has tripped me up in every employed or self-employed role I’ve ever had.
Jobs that I got through informal interviews and did really well in morphed into something completely different before my eyes as companies grew, colleagues appeared, protocols were adopted and job descriptions expanded. Burning out by 25, I became self-employed and won a clutch of grateful regular clients through sheer hard work but one entity, on which I depended the most and which was run by committee, called a meeting about me, after I’d diligently worked for them for five years, to question was I worth it, was I doing enough for my money, why couldn’t I do it in a more “conventional” manner (never mind that my way worked so well and saved them fortunes compared to employing staff), why didn’t I work as more of a team reporting back every minor decision to committee as a matter of protocol (never mind most of them were volunteers that understood little to nothing about the tasks I performed or the software I used). They made me feel like I was on trial and so I left.
Another company that had happily subcontracted work to me for years because I was their best person for turning around high quality and pretty challenging work in huge volume without ever giving them anything to worry about, I was even told I was the best they had ever had, decided to reformat who was allowed to to do said work and suddenly they were doing it in house, where they could watch over it more closely and make economies. I was declared obsolete at the worst possible time, just as my divorce became final, as the parent of a small child with a hefty mortgage (I had pinned my very survival strategy on the regularity of this work).
Within two more years, I had burned out again, only this time it was massive and I was never capable of working again due to my health.