The Social Security Administration (SSA) recently announced that it will no longer consider several outdated jobs as potential job opportunities when denying disability benefits, known as Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI).
The SSDI program provides monthly benefits to individuals who are no longer able to work due to a severe physical or mental disability that must be diagnosed to last at least one year or end at the individual’s death. To be eligible to receive SSDI payments, the applicant must have worked in a job covered by Social Security for a sufficient time to qualify. The amount of time depends on the age when the disability occurs. You must also have a qualifying medical condition and that, as we said before, is permanent for at least one year or results in death.
The Outdated Jobs That Were Blocking SSDI Applications
The third requirement is that the person cannot perform in a gainful activity or a job due to the medical condition or disability. This is where the funny thing about this SSA news comes in. The SSA has an official list of jobs in which a person with certain disabilities can work, which prevented thousands of applicants from being approved to receive payments. Some jobs have already become obsolete and the agency has been forced to update its criteria… several decades late, but something is something, isn’t it?
The list included jobs such as pneumatic tube operator, microfilm processor and nut sorter, all of which are considered obsolete in today’s job market. These jobs come from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT), a publication developed in 1938 by the United States Department of Labor. Although the DOT was abandoned by the Department of Labor more than thirty years ago, the Social Security Administration continued to use it for disability awards.
114 Obsolete Jobs Removed from SSDI Denied List
The list of jobs that a disabled person can presumably access to work has been used for decades as part of the Social Security process to assess the work capacity of applicants for disability benefits. In practice, it was often impossible for applicants to access many of these jobs on the list because, quite simply, they no longer exist. When reviewing applications, officials have to judge whether there is work “in significant quantities” that an applicant could still do.
The SSA uses the U.S. Department of Labor’s Dictionary of Occupational Titles, and the last time that list was revised was in 1994, but 12,700 skilled and unskilled occupations from the publication have not been revised since the 1970s. Most likely, many of them do not even exist in real life anymore.
Impact on SSDI Applicants
Some jobs seem to be from the 19th century, such as a nut sorter, and others from the Cold War, such as a microfilm processor. The truth is that more people who qualify based on their disabilities will be able to receive SSDI benefits, when it is their right and they have been denied in the past.