Open Doors
What more is there to say, this later in October, about National Disability Employment Awareness Month, or NDEAM for short? It’s hard to come up with anything new to say about disability and employment.
Millions of disabled Americans are looking for a good job, but can’t find one, no matter how good the economy might be. Lots of them have gone far out of their way to earn career credentials. Many have endured physical, mental, and financial hardships along the way that most people would never put up with themselves. Meanwhile, millions of other disabled people work hard every day, in low-wage jobs and work programs. They and the work they do has value, but they aren’t treated or paid that way. Most people know this, at least vaguely, unless they are decades rather than years behind current understanding of disability issues. It’s hard to
On the other hand, it’s relatively easy to exhort employers for the thousandth time to “hire the disabled,” extolling the supposed benefits of having disabled employees. So that’s what a lot of NDEAM seems to amount to. It’s a true and necessary message, but it feels insubstantial and inadequate. People with disabilities who are looking for work may find things like NDEAM superficially encouraging, but is it really much help? Does yet another annual round of corporate resolutions and seminars really amount to much in the way of better access and opportunity?
It’s complicated, too. Claims about how hard working and reliable disabled people are, though in a way usually true, often feel like they might be counterproductive — encouraging inflated expectations and even exploitation. Are we so desperate for “a chance” that we will literally do anything, for any small reward? Still, it’s always helpful to share practical tips — ways that employers can actually make work more accessible and genuinely worthwhile for applicants and employees with disabilities.
Maybe the best thing to do each October is go back to basics, and try to give the broadest possible audience as much basic information as possible on disability and employment.
Before another disability employment month ends, it may help to review some of the things that disability employment experts and people with disabilities know pretty well already, but others, including some disabled people, might not be so clear about.
1. Rates of unemployment for people with disabilities are consistently very high — much higher than for non-disabled people. Raw numbers alone don’t tell the full story. We have to compare employment rates of disabled and non-disabled people, in two distinct measures:
- Working-age employment to population ratio — the percent of people 16-64 that are employed: in 2020 it was 17.9% for people with disabilities, compared with 61.8% for non-disabled people.
- Unemployment rate — the percent of the population who are unemployed and actively looking for work: in 2020 it was 12.6% for people with disabilities, compared to 7.9% for non-disabled people.
True, the pandemic raised unemployment rates for everyone. However, its impact on employment was somewhat worse for disabled than for non-disabled people. And the overall employment gap between disbaled and non-disabled people rarely changes by more than a percentage point or two either way. Even accounting for disabled people who aren’t looking for work because of their disabilities, paid work is just much harder to find than it is for people who aren’t disabled.
2. Disability rights laws like Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act are designed to protect disabled people from workplace disability discrimination, and mandate accessibility and individual accommodations. But these regulations are hard to enforce. In most real life workplaces, the threat of an ADA discrimination lawsuit from a disabled applicant turned down for a job, or a disabled employee denied and accommodation just isn’t that signficant. The ADA provides a valuable template for equal opportunity, but not as much protection as some might think.
3. The federal government and some states have numerical hiring goals in an effort to open up employment opportunities to people with disabilities in government. This provides a potentially strong incentive, but only for a fairly narrow segment of the workforce,
4. Every state has a program specifically designed to help people with disabilities train for employment, and get and keep jobs. Each state program has its own name, but they are all generally termed “Vocational Rehabilitation.” It provides job counseling, adaptation ideas, various job training and coaching programs, and some funding for education. It’s a slate of services designed to help disabled people become more competitive in the job market. It’s a professional field that got its earliest start after the Civil War, and really got going after the First and Second World Wars, initially serving wounded soldiers looking for ways to make a living.
5. There are two different Social Security programs for people with disabilities who are deemed “unable to work” — Supplemental Security Income, (SSI), and Social Security Disability, (SSDI). Their amounts and eligibility criteria are different and can be quite complex. Roughly speaking, SSDI is for disabled people who have worked before, and their monthly benefits are based on their previous wages. SSI is based on income, and you don’t have to have worked to get it.
6. There are various restrictions on how much a disabled person can earn and save while still collecting SSDI, SSI, Medicaid and Medicare. While there are rules in place that are supposed to make it possible to gradually transition from benefits to work, most of these criteria and rules haven’t been significantly updated in decades. As a result, while Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are absolutely essential for many disabled people, their eligibility criteria also tend to trap us in poverty, and make actually doing well in a job perversely risky.
7. There is an over 80 year old provision of federal employment law that allows some disabled people to be paid less than minimum wage. It is intended to provide jobs for people who are thought to be unable to get any job at standard wages. It’s also supposed to be temporary, like an extended internship. But it tends to become permanent. And it’s often used as a dumping ground that looks like success, and as a source of cheap, easily exploited labor for some businesses. There is a growing movement to end the practice, but also some anxious opposition. These two recent segments of The Daily Show flesh out the issue pretty well:
8. One appealing way to avoid the disability discrimination that persists in so many standard workplaces is to set up special businesses specifically to provide employment to people with disabilities. You hear about them every now and then in your local news. Coffee shops and similar businesses that are promoted as employment opportunities for people with disabilities make for uplifting news stories. But while they can be genuinely positive workplaces, it’s important to ask critical questions about how the workers are paid, how they are treated on the job, and whether they are employed throughout the business or just in certain low-status roles.
9. There are several organizations that study disability and employment in depth, in an effort to better understand barriers to employment and hopefully suggest new solutions that might actually make a significant impact on that huge employment gap. These include Mathematica and the Kessler Foundation’s National Trends In Disability Employment, (nTIDE), program, which offers weekly online “Lunch and Learn” sessions anyone can join. Both these and similar programs try to go beyond the obvious, and figure out what roles are played by discrimination, education and job training, benefits rules, and wider economic and social conditions.
10. The working from home aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been an interesting experience for many disabled people. A lot of us have been clamoring for a long time for more opportunities to work from home. We hope these new opportunities will continue when the pandemic wanes. That said, we want working from home to be a choice for people with disabilities, not some kind of easier alternative to making workplaces accessible.
There could be another 10 bits of inside information to review. But these will do for now.
When it comes to significantly changing the employment figure for people with disabilities, persuasion isn’t enough. We need a more critical look at the problem, creative solutions, and a new commitment to make structural change. But we probably know most of what we need to know already. We just need to review it occasionally, and maybe view it all from some different angles.
Finally, in a month dedicated to getting disabled people working, it’s easy to forget that some disabled people who might, theoretically, be able to work make the rational decision not to. Sometimes, for some of us, it makes more sense to focus on our health and other aspects of our independence. Work can be an important part of all that, but it’s not always the answer for all of our problems.
Instead of touting employment as the way for disabled people to find a better life, maybe we should try making life for disabled people better, so more of us are secure enough to pursue employment from a position of strength.
