While the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in February 2021 one in four U.S. workers was working remotely — many employees will never return full-time to the office — remote work is less of an option for people with disabilities, said Ebony Cole, an employment specialist at Empower Tennessee, a Nashville center providing job-readiness, peer support, Braille transcription and other services aimed at helping disabled people live independently.
“There aren’t as many work-from-home jobs as [my clients] think there are,” Cole said, citing examples. “If you don’t have the education or experience, that’s a barrier. A work-from-home job in customer service is looking for five to ten years of customer service experience, but what if [job seekers] have never done it, and they can’t afford the training? The need for accommodation is a bigger deal than anything.”
In addition, many of her clients — most are vaccinated against COVID-19 and still mask — have reservations about returning to worksites where they might be near unvaccinated co-workers.
Those are among the realities that advocates for people with disabilities are spotlighting, post-pandemic, as employers rethink how workspaces should be constructed and where they should be located. If, in that shifting environment, more disabled people are going to be gainfully employed, employers will have to make some adjustments, advocates for people with disabilities said.
It’s a good thing that the employment gap between people with disabilities and those without has narrowed some during the pandemic, said Nathan Walsh, an employment attorney with Disability Rights Tennessee. “Every employer right now is looking to hire,” he said. “ … Whenever there are times like this, when companies are looking to hire, it makes the gap smaller.”
The pandemic has magnified how reasonable and practical it is to grant workers with disabilities the kinds of accommodations that many of them, for years, have been seeking, Walsh said.
Disabled employees were more likely to be part-timers
Of employable people with disabilities, 17.9% were on a payroll in 2020, according to a February 2021 federal report also finding that 19.3% of them were employed in 2019. By comparison, the respective rates were 61.8% and 66.3% for people without disabilities.
Of those disabled workers, 29% were employed part-time, while 16% of non-disabled workers were part-time earners.
Additionally, according to that federal survey, the unemployment rate for persons with a disability who were available to and had been looking for work was 12.6% percent in 2020, which was up from 7.3% in 2019. That compared, respectively, to 7.9% and 3.5% among people without disabilities. Also among disabled people, the 2020 unemployment rates were 16.8% for Hispanics, 16.3% for Blacks, 15.7% for Asians and 11.6% for Whites.
A variety of barriers are partly responsible for the overall employment disparities between disabled and non-disabled workers, advocates said. They include lack of physical modifications to worksites that people with impaired mobility need; insufficient access to screen-reading software; and lack of awareness about disabilities that are not readily, physically apparent to the average observer, Cole said.
“You can check people out at a cash register sitting just as well as standing,” Cole said, noting that jobs as cashiers or other positions at big-box stores often pay minimum wage. But they can be hard for someone with a physical disability to maneuver.
She suggests employers think about what it means to be more accommodating to workers with disabilities; too often, they’re not understanding.
Federal Office of Disability Employment research, spanning February 2020 to September 2020, found that information was one of the industries in which workers with disabilities experienced employment gains. However, in November 2020, researchers found that, at the start of the pandemic, “being in an occupation with some or limited telework opportunities is associated with larger declines in relative employment compared to occupations with high telework opportunities.” And the effect is more pronounced for disabled workers.
The same study found that as the pandemic has progressed, employment rates for people with disabilities declined more “in low-and-medium contact-intensity occupations compared to those in high-contact intensity occupations.” Those February through September 2020 job declines were the greatest in fields such as professional and business services, health care and trades. However, employment gains occurred in agriculture, information, transportation, finance and construction.
Advocates: Safety of disabled, in-person workers is critical
Walsh said federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration monitoring to ensure that workplaces provide employees with masks and other protective gear is limited and focused, instead, on obvious non-compliance with safety regulations. “If your workplace is completely ignoring COVID, and having you do everything with no safeguards exactly as before, then, potentially, that would be something to consider reporting to them. They’re great watchdogs. You’re protected against retaliation [if you report a violation to OSHA].”
He said American society’s overall attitudes toward people with disabilities has improved. He hopes that will help lessen employment discrimination, like that outlined in a 2019 brief by University of Chicago researchers who concluded, among other things, that “people with disabilities experience discrimination through both attitudinal and structural barriers to inclusion.”
► Rutgers University researchers examined how remote work further marginalized many disabled workers. Read more …
He continued, citing the relatively fast move to remote work in the pandemic’s earliest stages: “One thing I think COVID is going to do, in the long run, is make it harder for employers to argue that things are undue burdens, because they’ve been running the last year, and it hasn’t been an undue burden. There’s going to be a shift. It’s going to be slow because case law happens one case at a time. But it will come.”
What isn’t changing as speedily is the dialogue around self-disclosure, experts said. Employees with disabilities often hesitate to make that plain to potential employers, but Walsh advises his clients to do so only when they have to make a case for workplace accommodations that they require. “If you need [to disclose to get] the interview, then disclose it then. If you don’t need [to disclose] until after you’re hired and working the job, that’s the time,” he said. “I know things are changing and a lot of companies are embracing diversity, but unfortunately, it’s still dangerous for people with disabilities to disclose.”
Disclosing early on can be advantage when dealing with employers whose diversity, equity and inclusion plans also incorporate people with disabilities, he added.
Cole agrees. She said disclosure is a choice, but argues that workers should be aware of the accommodations they need to do their jobs before accepting offers. She sees helping people become aware of those needs as a key part of the independent living movement.
