Career Wellness – Work opportunities for the Disabled

Although there is a lot of good to be said about the low level of unemployability we are now going through, those with disabilities are getting a raw deal. The disabled are working more but still suffer in terms of lower employment numbers. In a recent release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it was said that: In 2017, only 18.7 percent of persons with a disability were employed and by way of a contrast, the employment-population ratio for those without a disability was 65.7 percent.

Highlights from this report show in 2017:

  • Nearly half of all persons with a disability were age 65 and over, three times larger than the share of those with no disability.
  • Across all age groups, the employment-population ratios were much lower for persons with a disability than for those with no disability.
  • Unemployment rates for persons with a disability were higher than for persons without a disability across all educational attainment groups.
  • 32% of workers with a disability were employed part-time, compared to 17% for those without a disability.
  • Employed persons with a disability were more likely to be self-employed than those with no disability.
  • The unemployment rate for persons with a disability was 9.2 percent in 2017, more than twice that of those with no disability (4.2 percent). (Unemployed persons are those who did not have a job, were available for work, and were actively looking for a job in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.)

The unemployment rates for persons with and without a disability were both lower in 2017 than in the prior year.

In 2017, the unemployment rate for men with a disability (9.0 percent) was about the same as the rate for women (9.5 percent). The unemployment rates for both men and women declined from 2016 to 2017. Although jobless rates for persons with a disability declined among all major race and ethnicity groups in 2017, Blacks (13.8 percent) continued to have a higher unemployment rate than Hispanics (10.2 percent), Whites (8.5 percent), and Asians (6.6 percent).