In each one, there must be the ability to perform work on a sustained basis which means eight hours a day, five days a week with a half hour for lunch and a 10-minute break in the morning hours or before lunch, and another 10-minute break in the afternoon hours, or after lunch. Each one of these has a specific definition that we explain below. The four exertional categories are: Heavy Work, Medium Work, Light Work, and Sedentary Work. These categories come straight from the Department of Labor’s Directory of Occupational Titles. There are four (4) exertional categories within the SSA Regulations. We analyze them based on your age, because that’s where the rubber meets the road. Many practitioners analyze the Grids based on one’s exertional capacity. But make no mistake, absent the Grid Rules, the Agency would gleefully deny tens of thousands of claims every year on the basis that long-time, hard-working Americans, can put pencils in a box for minimum wage. The Grids recognize that as we age, our skills and ability to learn new skills diminish, and we can therefore be found disabled based on our current limitations, the type of work we performed in the past, and one’s ability to adapt to other work. The Grids is a recognition by the drafters of the Regulations that as working Americans age, certain medical impairments and limitations make it much more difficult for them to adapt and re-tool enough to compete with younger workers. Fortunately, because of public backlash they have thus far been tempered and muted in their efforts. It is nothing like that now and for that reason and that excuse, the Agency has been itching for decades to eliminate the Grids. They were drafted during the time in which the booming US economy was overwhelmingly a manufacturing-based economy. The Social Security Disability Regulations were drafted and passed by Congress in the late 1960s.
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