Disability and Employment

This introductory chapter highlights the importance of the issue of providing employment opportunities for people with disabilities. It also notes the need for a deeper understanding of the disability‒employment relationship. It is a reality that more than one-tenth of the world’s population has a disability and people with disabilities are often deprived of their rightful chances to have a job and live life to the fullest. To address this state of affairs, Article 27 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and Target 8.5 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were introduced by the United Nations. Despite these efforts, people with disabilities still face difficulties in obtaining employment in the labour market.

This chapter conceptualises and defines disability in the context of labour market and production in a competitive business environment. It points out that there is no well-accepted concept of what disability is. Instead, “disability” remains haphazardly demarcated from a “normal” condition. The idea of this “unwelcome deviation” from normality appeared when the concept of “normal” had acquired its modern meaning. The chapter points out that the mode of production under the modern capitalist system and its pursuit of efficiency has contributed to creating and reinforcing the negative stereotypes of disability in the context of the labour market. This chapter proceeds to examine three models to conceptualise disability, namely, the medical model which views disability as a personal tragedy, the social model which stresses social oppression and the capability model that links human potential and achievement. As the chapter argues, among the three alternative conceptualizations of disability, the capability model allows for a deeper understanding of disability in the context of the labour market and mass production.

This chapter offers a comprehensive review of the scholarly literature on the relationship between disability and employment. It focuses on the debate over whether labour market interventions have a positive impact on the employment of people with disabilities. A thorough review was conducted of the major studies on the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on the employment situation of people with disabilities. As this chapter notes, there is an increasing number of published studies on the relationship between disability and employment, however, the most productive institutions in this research are located in Western countries. Furthermore, there is still a scarcity of systematic studies on the phenomenon of persistently high unemployment rates among people with disabilities. As this chapter observes, no definitive conclusions have been reached in the research literature concerning the labour market outcomes of the ADA enactment. However, the opinions on the presence of the negative effects of the ADA are dominant, rather than the views on the absence of such effects. This chapter also traces the on-going debate on the effectiveness of labour market interventions beyond the context of the United States and reviews empirical studies done in other countries.

This empirically oriented chapter examines the patterns and convergence of the unemployment rates for people with disabilities and other demographic groups. It uses the data on monthly unemployment rates in the United States. Five types of unit root tests were performed, namely, the ADF test, the FADF test, the FADF–SB test, SUR–FADF and the YOFA test. In addition, four types of fractional integration tests were done, namely, the GPH test, the R–FI test, the AY–FI test and the YOFA–FI test. The empirical findings on the unemployment rates indicated that there was no major differences in the patterns of the unemployment rates for people with disabilities and other demographic groups. Furthermore, the empirical findings on the convergence of the unemployment rates for various demographic groups revealed that there was no convergence in the unemployment rates between people with disabilities and people without disabilities. More importantly, the structural break in the unemployment rate for people with disabilities took place earlier compared to the structural break in the total unemployment. This result confirms the “first-to-be-fired” tendency in employment of people with disabilities. The findings also indicated that the predicted value of the unemployment rate for people with disabilities decreased slower than the total unemployment. This fact confirms the “last-to-be-hired” tendency in employment of people with disabilities.

This empirically-oriented chapter examines the determinants of the disability unemployment gap or the difference in unemployment rates for people with disabilities and for people without disabilities.

In this main theoretical chapter of the book, the canonical search model, the Mortensen–Pissarides model, is used to examine the relative efficacy of labour market intervention policies aimed at reducing the disability unemployment gap by promoting employment for people with disabilities.

This concluding chapter offers a summary of the key findings of this book. The main theoretical contribution of this study is the use of the “law of one unemployment rate” to explain the differences in and convergence of the unemployment rates for various demographic groups. Also, a modified Acemoglu’s two-sector search model was adopted to analyse the differences between “bad” jobs and “good” jobs in the labour market. The modified framework incorporates the “procyclical” assumption into the original model in order to allow for the exploration of differences in labour market outcomes and their impact on workers with disabilities and workers without disabilities. A practical contribution of this book is the finding that the search subsidy is the most effective labour market intervention policy as people with disabilities suffer from high unemployment due to high job destruction.