Dennis Hogan Julia Drew Brown University
Over the past 40 years, the status of people with disabilities in the U.S. has changed dramatically. Many state institutions housing people with disabilities have been dismantled and several important pieces of civil rights legislation have passed, mandating the inclusion of people with disabilities in schools and workplaces. Civil rights legislation targeting people with disabilities has had some success: More people with disabilities live in the community than ever before, and certain indicators of their social wellbeing show promising growth. In particular, the share of people with disabilities attaining any college education doubled between 1980 and 2000. Despite these gains, however, a troubling trend has surfaced. People with disabilities were more likely to be employed 20 years ago than they were 10 years ago, and they are even less likely to be employed today. Although macro-level forces like the 2008-09 recession are surely implicated, even times of widespread economic prosperity - like the mid- to late-1990s ? saw sharply declining employment among people with disabilities. How can this be?
This project asks: 1) why is there such low employment among people with disabilities and why is it getting worse while educational attainment, the primary predictor of employment, is getting better; 2) who comprises the minority of people with disabilities that work and what seems to explain their relative success; 3) what circumstances surround work entrances and exits; 4) what effects does such widespread unemployment have on the lives of people with disabilities; and 5) what does the unemployed majority do to accomplish economic survival? This project contributes to mesolevel sociological theories of disability by explaining how long-run changes in institutional constraints and opportunities have affected the employment and educational experiences of people with disabilities. This project answers these questions through a combination of qualitative methods and quantitative methods. Qualitative methods include in-depth interviews with people with disabilities living in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, participant observation, and analysis of textual materials. Quantitative methods include multivariate mixed effects and event history analyses of the 1969-2008 National Health Interview Surveys and the 1996-2004 Surveys of Income and Program Participation, respectively.
Broader Impacts. This project contributes to the goals outlined by the 2006 U.N. international convention on the rights of people with disabilities by examining why Americans with disabilities experience such severe and persistent levels of unemployment, and the consequences it has for their day-to-day lives. Findings will inform public policies to advance the inclusion of people with disabilities into U.S. society. Project findings will also provide generalizable understandings of why public policies designed to improve the lives of marginalized citizens fail. Last, this project contributes significantly to the interdisciplinary literature on work and disability, in which sociological perspectives have been absent.
The central research questions of this dissertation were: Why is there simultaneous growth in college education and eroding participation in paid employment among people with disabilities? Who comprises the minority of people with disabilities that work and how well does this minority fare when they actually work? And, what does the unemployed majority do to accomplish economic survival? This dissertation has three key findings. First, people with disabilities who manage to secure employment face substantial disparities in pay – even after considering their education and other important factors – and a major reason is because they work in lower-paying jobs. A full 25% of the earnings inequality experienced by full-time workers with disabilities is due to their employment in lower-paid occupations. Workers with disabilities experience considerable employer discrimination that prevents them from obtaining desirable, higher-paying jobs and that relegates them to part-time and temporary work arrangements, if they can get a job at all. Additionally, working-age people with disabilities are often unwilling or unable to give up the safety net provided by disability benefits in the face of temporary and uncertain work arrangements that often do not include adequate health insurance. Programmatic benefit eligibility rules play an important role in the kinds of work people with disabilities choose. Second, social changes led to a dramatic increase in college attendance for people with disabilities. At the same time, those who enjoyed the best access to mainstream education and civil rights protections were the least likely to work. An analysis of data covering the last 40 years demonstrates that young people with disabilities coming of age at the beginning of the 21st century were simultaneously the best educated and the least employed. While workers without disabilities experienced growing employment, people with disabilities experienced a level of employment that was lower than any point since 1969. Interview data show that expanded access to schooling for people with disabilities exposes them to mainstream educational and career aspirations, but these aspirations are unmatched by contemporary labor market realities. Third, both jobless and employed people with disabilities depend on welfare state benefits to make ends meet, but both groups still experience high levels of material hardship. Eighty percent of jobless adults and 60% of employed adults with disabilities received unearned income – primarily from disability benefits. Despite the low levels of income provided through welfare state benefits – less than $1,000 per month – the income brought in by people with disabilities made up half of their household’s total income. A considerable share of both jobless and employed adults with disabilities experience material hardship. One-third of jobless people with disabilities had problems getting enough food to eat,16% were unable to see a doctor when they needed to, and 20% lived in substandard housing with problems like pests and broken windows. Employed people with disabilities were not much better off. Twenty percent had problems getting enough food to eat, 15% were unable to see a doctor when they needed to and 17% lived in substandard housing. People with disabilities face complex barriers to full labor market participation. While there are people with disabilities who do not wish to or cannot work, there are others who are stymied by employer discrimination and difficult choices posed by restrictive welfare state rules. More information is needed about what can be done to improve the chances that people with disabilities will obtain jobs that better match their training and aspirations. Furthermore, it is not always clear that, when people with disabilities work, they are better off than jobless people with disabilities. Continuing investments in the education and training of people with disabilities are a critical piece of the low employment puzzle. However, without addressing the larger structural barriers, the problems of widespread joblessness, labor market inequality, and substantial material hardship will continue or get worse. More direct information about employer practices is needed. For example, questions remain about which employers are less likely to discriminate and under what circumstances employers are less likely to discriminate against people with disabilities. One of the major policy remedies to address persistently low employment is anti-discrimination laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. However, the enforcement of equal employment opportunity law for workers with disabilities is not as rigorous as it is for minorities and women. For example, the EEOC collects annual survey data from employers about the gender and racial makeup of their workforce, but they do not collect similar data about the share of employees with disabilities. The EEOC also engages in matched-pair testing (where teams of trained individuals, one black and one white, interview with prospective employers) to identify and track racial discrimination in hiring. Despite the evidence of widespread employer discrimination against people with disabilities, such efforts are not currently utilized for detecting disability discrimination.
