Partly because many of them lack internet access and are disproportionately employed in retail, food and other service industries, workers with disabilities, comparatively, have remained on the outskirts of a record expansion in remote employment spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Rutgers University study.
Though more disabled than non-disabled employees worked from home before the pandemic, by June 2021, 14.5% of employed people without disabilities and 12.7% of those with disabilities were doing so, according to the analysis, released last month, by Rutgers’ Program for Disability Research. Prior to COVID-19, 5.5% of people with disabilities worked from home, compared to 4.4% of people without disabilities.
“It depends so much on the type of job you’re in,” said Douglas Kruse, one of the study’s co-authors. “People who are going to be in blue-collar and service jobs; most of those jobs can’t be at home.”
The discrepancy was even more pronounced among those aged 18 through 26: 10.8% of disabled workers but 14.6% of non-disabled ones, as a monthly average, had done home-based work due to the pandemic.
Also, among 18- through 26-year-olds, 12.5% of people with disabilities lived in homes without internet access, compared to 10.2% of people without disabilities.
Areas including management, professional services or administrative support were ones most likely to offer remote work, illustrating the need for better internet access and educational opportunities for young people with disabilities, Kruse said. “If they get into a white collar-type of job I think there’s every reason to expect they will be able to do some telework.”
Across six job categories, the study found that:
- 42.5% of non-disabled and 36.4% of disabled managers worked from home.
- 39.9% of non-disabled and 39.5% of disabled professionals worked from home.
- 25.6% of non-disabled and 25.5% of disabled office and administrative support staff worked from home.
- 18.5% of non-disabled and 12.5% of disabled salespeople worked from home.
- 4.3% of non-disabled and 4.1% disabled service employees worked from home.
- 3.2% of non-disabled and 3.3% disabled blue-collar employees worked from home.
Employer bias may determine who gets to work remotely
Discrimination may also play some role in the telework divide. Even within the top fields for teleworking, people with disabilities were less likely to work remotely than people without disabilities during the pandemic, according to the study.
In August, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed its first lawsuit, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, related to telework and the pandemic. The suit alleges that Georgia-based ISS Facility Services violated the ADA when it denied a request from Ronisha Moncrief, who is disabled by a heart-and-lung condition, to continue working from home when the company reopened its office in June 2020.
The pandemic, Kruse said, also has bolstered the legal leverage that people with disabilities have to request remote work as a reasonable accommodation.
Before the pandemic, employees rarely won disability discrimination cases related to remote work because employers could just argue that being on site was an essential, core component of the job, he added. But if those same employers allowed remote work during the pandemic, that now seems a harder argument to win.
“It could really help people with disabilities in particular, who now can just say, ‘Obviously a lot of this work can be done at home,’” Kruse said. “They’re not going to meet the same resistance that they did before … There’s a potential, five or 10 years from now, for this to be a plus for people with disabilities, that employers are going to be more open to telework and other kinds of accommodations too.”
► Disabilities experts hope workplace changes triggered by the pandemic will yield better, more flexible jobs for disabled workers. Read more …
Additionally, though it didn’t specify the wage gaps, the Rutgers study concluded that, even when people with disabilities are able to access telework, they tend to be paid less than their non-disabled peers. “A lot of that seems to be discrimination, honestly,” said Lisa Schur, another of the study’s co-authors.
Still, Schur said that, going forward, young people with disabilities should be able to find more opportunities to work from home, if they know what to look for.
“A lot of companies have statements about their values or their corporate culture,” Schur said. “Do some research into that and see if the company emphasizes things like flexibility and meeting the needs of employees. See if they happen to mention telework.”
