People With Disabilities Want To Work — But It’s Complicated

The most concrete goal of National Disability Employment Awareness Month each October is to increase employment rates and job opportunities for Americans with disabilities. This of course assumes that disabled people want to work – which is for the most part a perfectly valid assumption.

But it’s also important to dig deeper into the complex relationship disabled people often have with work and paid employment. There are more than just one or two obvious barriers to disabled people in the workplace and job market. And disabled people’s feelings and orientations towards work should not be oversimplified. By and large, disabled people want to work. But their feelings about work are often mixed in very particular ways.

According to the Center on Disability Research at the University of New Hampshire, the August 2023 Labor Force Participation Rate for people with disabilities in the U.S. was 41.2%, and the Employment to Population Ratio was 37.9%. Exactly what each figure represents is less important than the fact that both were almost a full percentage point above those of July, which were themselves on the high end of long-term historical trends.

This can be interpreted in a couple of ways. The monthly figures represent comparatively high employment rates for disabled Americans. That is surely an encouraging sign for disabled people looking for work.

At the same time, these rates still mark only a slight narrowing of an otherwise massive employment gap between disabled and non-disabled people. It’s a gap that grows, shrinks, and fluctuates with the state of the economy, but has always been very wide. For as long as we have reliable records, Americans with disabilities have been unemployed and absent from the labor market more than almost any other working-age population, and by substantial margins.

Most efforts to chip away at this disparity, like National Disability Employment Awareness Month, focus on persuading employers to hire more disabled people. But it’s always worth questioning the assumption behind most disability employment efforts — that disabled people actually want to work.

If asked point blank if they want to work, most disabled people of working age would answer “yes,” especially if a simple “yes” and “no” were the only answers allowed. But a great many would give more nuanced and conditional answers if they were allowed to elaborate. Not all disabled people want to work today, or tomorrow, or in the near future. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in working for pay some day, under certain conditions, and with the right supporting infrastructures. And a lot of disabled people’s idea of “work” is different in some ways from typical “9 to 5” jobs. At the same time, many of their key expectations of work are the same as anyone else’s – benefits they aren’t willing to trade away so easily just for “a chance.”

Before this October ends, it’s worth exploring some of the factors that make the idea and aspiration for work more complex for people with disabilities. Here are a few to start with:

^{Many disabled people can work and want to work, but irregularly.}

Plenty of disabled are ready and willing to work regular, nine-to-five jobs with no particular problem that can’t be solved with basic accommodations. But many more can only consider working on less traditional schedules – dictated by their disabilities, finances, or professions. Disabled people who for various reasons can’t work full time, may be able to work if they can do so for fewer hours week or month, on seasonal schedules, or freelance where hours in general matter less than completed tasks.

What about remote work? There is some evidence that the expansion of work from home opportunities during the pandemic was partly responsible for the recent rise in disabled people’s employment. And working from home has always been something at least some disabled people have pushed for, as a way to make work itself more feasible. But with pressures from various sides now pushing back against remote work, it remains to be seen whether these opportunities for disabled people will stay and expand, or disappear.

Disabled people care about how they are paid, just like everyone else.

The value and personal rewards of volunteering, and utopian visions of cashless societies aside, people living in modern economies generally expect to be paid for their work. They expect to be paid not just for their “output” but for their time and effort as well. And increasingly, disabled people expect to be paid under the same basic standards and conditions as any other worker.

Paying some disabled workers sub-minimum wage was once arguably a reasonable way to create job opportunities for people with disabilities. This was based on the assumption that jobs at regular wages would always be beyond disabled people’s reach. The phrase “better than nothing” perfectly describes this view. And it is still the most common underlying justification for sub-minimum wage today. However, these arguments have worn very thin, and the practice of paying some disabled workers less than minimum wage may be close to ending.

Disabled people can at times be fairly described as desperate for a job. But they also do care about how they are paid. They shouldn’t be expected to be unconditionally grateful for literally any job or opportunity, just because they are disabled. Some disabled might feel that way. And at least some disabled people who care more about job satisfaction and contributing to society than they do about wages. But building this idea into employment policy just for certain disabled workers can no longer be justified, if it was ever justifiable at all.

This principle applies as well to more than just formal sub-minimum wage programs. Disabled people increasingly resent being asked to work for free or at a discount in freelance markets too. It’s no longer enough to be allowed to work, or invited to contribute just for the exposure, for experience, for something to do, or because work is equated in American culture with virtue.

Many disabled people rely on benefits they can’t live without, and are far too easy to lose.

Monetary and health care benefits for disabled people at federal and state levels have various eligibility rules. But most benefits people with disabilities need in order to cope with the expenses of their disabilities can be lost if they work too many hours, earn too much per month, or save too much money.

Despite some helpful “work incentives,” disabled people who work risk losing not just monetary benefits like Disability and SSI, but stable, full-service health care like Medicare and Medicaid. And the eligibility thresholds for programs like Social Security Disability, (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income, (SSI) are far out of date — set at rates that were stingy and strict 40 years ago, and make almost no financial sense today. Unless they are fortunate to have a job that pays a very high salary and has generous, ironclad health insurance, disabled people constantly have to balance work with benefits. It’s both an emotional and ruthlessly mathematical calculus that recurs every single month and is almost impossible to escape.

Efforts to improve this situation have been active in recent years, but still in their infancy. There is a new bill in Congress, with unusually bipartisan support – the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act. It would raise the maximum savings for SSI eligibility from $2,000 for individuals and $3,000 for married couples, (limits last adjusted almost 40 years ago), to $10,000 for individuals and $20,000 for couples. This would partially address one of the specific conflicts between work and benefits. But there is much more to do to meaningfully remove this longtime barrier to disabled people’s employment and financial goals.

Sometimes, deciding not to work, or even look for work, is the right choice.

At times, the most rational choice a disabled person can make is to work on their physical and mental health instead of a job or career. Disabled people also often have to balance their career aspirations between what they know is theoretically possible, and whether at any given time they can responsibly handle both their work and self-care responsibilities. A disabled person may ask themselves, “Could I be working right now?” and the answer would be “Yes,” but then ask, “Should I be working right now,” and reasonably answer, “Maybe not.”

Disability employment efforts can have what seem like the same goals, but very different motivations. Disabled people want equal opportunity and support for achieving their own employment goals. What they don’t want or need is policies designed to corner them into work by threatening to take away benefits, or by redefining disabilities in order to exclude them from disability support programs. Optimism about disabled people’s potential in the job market should never be used to shame or penalize disabled people who at any given moment aren’t working. Any apparent example of laziness, lack of ambition, or complacent reliance on benefits may in fact be someone who made an entirely sensible decision not to work. And disability employment programs need to take this fact into account.

Changing employers’ attitudes is important, but not enough alone to improve employment for people with disabilities. Better education, job training, and support is vital, but not enough either. Stronger enforcement of disability rights laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act would help, but likewise not enough.

Work itself, and the structures around it, need to be updated and redesigned. They need to be more generous, more flexible, and most importantly, focused on fulfilling disabled people’s own authentic work and career goals.