Employment gap widens for workers with disabilities
Just in the past few years, the employment gap has widened between the number of working-age Americans with disabilities who are employed and those workers without disabilities, as a recent government study has reported.
The finding was part of a series of reports released by Cornell University in collaboration with the American Association of People with Disabilities. The researchers found that the “employment gap” between those with disabilities in the work force and those workers without disabilities was 40.3 percent. That represents a .6 percentage point increase from the previous year, when the gap was 39.7 percent.
The growth in the gap means that there are fewer people with disabilities in the work force relative to the total number of Americans employed.
“The rise in the employment gap also suggests that people with disabilities are not participating in the current economy,” said Andrew Houtenville, director of Cornell’s Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Disability Demographics and Statistics.
Another key finding in the reports also highlighted the fact that the poverty rate rose more for people with disabilities than for those without. For people with disabilities, it increased .8 percentage points, to 24.1 percent of working-age Americans, and from 23.3 percent the year after. For people without disabilities, while the poverty rate did increase, it only increased .2 percentage points, to 9.1 percent, from 8.9 percent the year before.
Some Cornell researchers are investigating whether the employment gap may be due, in part, to what they call the “poverty trap.” Under current federal rules, people with disabilities must be essentially unemployed to receive government benefits, but the support they receive isn’t enough to keep them out of poverty, they point out. As a matter of fact, to my recollection, nothing significant has been done to right this wrong.
“Those with the lowest incomes lose 50 cents for every dollar they earn. That’s a higher tax rate than Bill Gates pays,” said David Stapleton, director of the Cornell Institute for Policy Research.
Stapleton and others recommended that federal policy be revisited to reward, rather than punish, people with disabilities who earn income through employment.
The Cornell reports also showed that the recent employment rate of working-age people without disabilities was 77.6 percent, as compared with 37.9 percent for working-age people with disabilities that year.
Later on, the employment rate for people without disabilities rose .2 percentage points, to 77.8 percent, while the employment rate of people with disabilities declined .4 percentage points, to 37.5 percent.
Clearly, a number of items need to be addressed to right many of these wrongs.
In particular, the “poverty gap” must be addressed and solved so that people with disabilities who want to work are not “punished” because they did get a job that paid them “earned income.”
By the way, this is just one of many such ill-thought-out government regulations that still end up penalizing people with disabilities who want to and are working.
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