Disability Employment: Are We at the Tipping Point?

Later this month, when our country marks the 22nd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, many of the law’s champions will lament that the employment situation for our citizens with disabilities has not improved since the ADA was signed.

In recent years, that situation has gotten worse. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the disability workforce shrank by over 10 percent during the recession, five times faster than the non-disability workforce, which shrank by only about two percent.

And BLS data released earlier this month reveal that as the rest of the workforce has slowly begun to recover, the disability workforce has lagged. The number of working age Americans without disabilities participating in the labor force grew by almost 3 million in the past year. During the same period, the number of workers with disabilities declined by 94,000. Even at the high water mark for disability employment before the recession, only 37 percent of working age adults with disabilities were in the labor force.

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