Business:

According to a recent published study by H. Stephen Kaye, Ph.D., Institute for Health & Aging, University of California San Francisco, the increase in unemployment for people with disabilities is increasing. Dr. Kaye has numbers to support it. Between October 2008 and October 2009, the number of employed working-age adults with disabilities declined by 13.6 percent, more than three times the 4.2 percent drop among working-age adults without disabilities. At the beginning of the period (October 2008), when the unemployment rate for working-age labor force participants without disabilities was still a relatively low 5.8 percent, the corresponding rate for those with disabilities was just over twice as high, at 11.8 percent. There was a large increase in both rates during the next few months; by mid-2009, when the unemployment rate among working-age adults without disabilities had risen to 9.3 percent, the rate for working-age adults with disabilities had climbed to 15.2 percent.

There were 644,000 fewer employed working-age adults with disabilities in the U.S. economy in October 2009 than there were one year earlier, a rate of decline (13.6 percent actual or 15.2 percent from the trend fit) that is very significantly greater than that for workers without disabilities (4.2 percent, or 4.9 percent from the trend fit). The employment rate (technically the employment-to-population ratio) among working-age adults with disabilities declined from 32.2 percent to 28.4 percent. Large and significant declines in employment levels are evident not only for the disability population as a whole, but also across all types of disability except visual impairment, and for older and younger workers, both men and women, and people with all levels of educational attainment.

The number (644,000) of fewer working adults with disabilities is astounding! With a concentrated effort of education, DEFNY can work with corporations to include people with disabilities in the conversation of employment.