| The presence of a disability is widely known to affect both earnings and
worklife expectancy. This finding is documented in results from various surveys, including the
Current Population Survey (CPS), the Survey of Income and Program
Participation (both from the Census Bureau), the National Health Interview
Survey (NHIS) from the National Center for Health Statistics, and the 1998
N.O.D./Harris Survey of Americans With Disabilities.
The disability effect is the cause of such events as the passage of
the well-known Americans with Disabilities Act, the existence of the
President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, and the
practice of rehabilitation counseling, just to name a few.
It is important to understand the
impact of permanent work disability on people in the modern labor market.
Employers and employees do not form lifetime relationships where
the employee stays with a single employer for the duration of his or her
career – whether they are disabled or not.
According to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, the average U.S.
worker has more than nine employers just between the ages of 18 and 36,
let alone further shifts after the age of 36.
In addition, private research (Gibson
2000; Yelin 1996; Yelin and Trupin 1997) has shown
that employed persons with a work disability, both not severe and severe,
are more likely to become unemployed than persons without a work
disability. If unemployed,
they are less likely to find employment.
These differences become more profound with age. Similar findings
were presented in a paper by
McCollister and Pflaum
(2004). Using data from the NHIS, they found that persons with
back pain were less likely to be employed than persons without disability
and that the difference increased with age.
Even if persons with a work disability find employment conducive to their
disabilities, they face ongoing struggles to cope with their disabilities.
These struggles may intensify with age, continuously making it more
difficult to compete with their counterparts without disability. The
same holds true when, despite a cognitive injury (e.g., traumatic brain
injury, lead poisoning), a child is expected to complete the same
educational level that he or she would have been expected to complete
absent injury. Persons with high school diplomas, for instance, have
a wide range of intellectual capabilities and, therefore, a wide range of
earning capabilities. Saying that a person will still be able to
obtain a high school diploma does not negate the possibility of a loss of
earnings. The impairments will place the individual at a
disadvantage in the labor market compared to those without disability, and
likely cause the person to have a harder time finding and/or maintaining
comparable employment. |
