One Size Does Not Fit All: A New Look at the Labor Force Participation of People with Disabilities

A just-released brief from the American Institutes for Research casts new light on a perennial problem: the one-third of people with disabilities who haven’t sought work or stopped trying to find it.

Among those able to work who are either employed or actively looking for jobs, the data for people with disabilities has remained stagnant or declined despite “the array of federal policies, executive orders, and incentive programs intended to increase the employment and employability of people with disabilities,” according to the study.

The paper, “One Size Does Not Fit All: A New Look at the Labor Force Participation of People with Disabilities,” suggests that a key problem is that federal and state efforts currently treat people with disabilities as a homogeneous group. But authors Michelle Yin and Dahlia Shaewitz found that once labor participation data was broken down by state and disability type, a different picture emerged.

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One Size Does Not Fit All: A New Look at the Labor Force Participation of People with Disabilities