People with disabilities have been among the biggest beneficiaries of the strong post-pandemic rebound in the labor market.
And on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics added another data point to this trend.
Among that community, the number of people employed rose by about 175,000 in June to 7.6 million, the BLS said, higher than at any time since June 2008, the first year for which data is available.
As a percentage, the employment-to-population ratio for disabled people is also now at an all-time high of 22.4%.
“It continues to grow, and it seems to get better every month,” said Allison Chase, president and CEO of The Able Trust, a Florida-based nonprofit focused on the disability community. “It’s unprecedented and we’re very excited.”
Experts say the rise in jobs is the result of steady and steady labor demand thanks to ongoing worker shortages in many parts of the economy, as well as lessening of the stigma of working from home as a result of the pandemic.
The BLS reported Friday that the US added 209,000 jobs, with the unemployment rate falling to 3.6%.
Chase noted that basic transportation is one of the biggest barriers many people with disabilities have faced when seeking employment.
The post-pandemic boom in remote work, he said, has helped remove that hurdle.
“It’s something that a lot of people with disabilities have wanted for a long time,” Chase said. “Once you take [transportation] out of the equation, a lot of jobs open up.”
It is difficult to obtain data showing which industries or occupations have seen the largest recent gains in the ranks of workers with disabilities. Historically, the workforce of this population has been concentrated in different forms of retail work, as well as manual labor in food preparation or cleaning services.
Often the most coveted jobs remain in the business and professional services sector, which tend to command higher salaries. The growth potential of these jobs will help “ensure that people with disabilities are less concentrated in blue-collar and service jobs that tend to pay less and provide less job security,” researchers wrote in a paper. paper published in April in the journal Disability and Health.
Anecdotally, those white-collar opportunities increased amid the remote work shift and tech-driven hiring boom in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, experts said, though the boom in that sector has since reversed, with massive layoffs in the tech sector. .
It is important to note here that the disability community is very diverse. Disability advocates estimate that a quarter of the US population lives with a disability, but that 70% of disabilities, especially those that are cognitive in nature, are defined as “invisible.”
However, the disability community continues to face enormous obstacles in accessing employment. As a result, only 4% of workers self-identify as disabled.
In a report published in February summarizing the 2022 job market for people with disabilitiesthe BLS found:
- Across all age groups, people with disabilities were still much less likely to be employed than those without disabilities.
- The unemployment rate for people with disabilities was still almost double the rate for people without disabilities.
- In 2022, 30% of workers with disabilities were employed part-time, compared to 16% of those without disabilities.
“We are building on an extremely low foundation,” said Carol Glazer, president of the National Organization on Disability, which describes itself as the country’s oldest civil rights group.
There also continues to be a trend among federal courts ruling against workers seeking accommodations, such as working from home, even after the pandemic, according to Nicole Buonocore Porter, a law professor at Chicago-Kent Law School.
“Yeah [an employer] If you can tell a court, and the court believes it, that in-person presence at a central workplace is an essential part of a job, working from home will never be considered reasonable,” he said.
Glazer noted that the labor force participation rate among disabled workers is still about half that of the general population.
“There is still a long way to go,” he said.
