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Madelynn Bramm (featured in banner photo) was a healthy woman in her early 20s when an arteriovenous malformation ruptured in her brain leaving her with partial right-side paralysis and difficulty finding words. “My brain basically exploded,” she says. Before her incident, Bramm was working full-time in Waterman, Illinois, for pharmaceutical company Bayer, helping to breed corn worms and stink bugs in their crop science department. After months of vocational rehabilitation at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, she returned to Bayer working three days a week but only breeding corn worms this time because stink bugs required two hands. “Thankfully, Bayer has been so accommodating,” Bramm says. “When I first started back, people were asking, ‘Do you need anything or can you do this?’ I do get tired very easily, but I can take breaks throughout the day.”
Stories like Bramm’s are heartening for those working to increase employment levels for people with disabilities. After decades of little or no progress, national data shows that real gains are being made. Employment levels for people with disabilities continued to increase and reach historic highs during 2023, according to a recent report by the Kessler Foundation. On a yearly basis, the portion of people with disabilities who were employed rose to 37.2% through October 2023, up from 35.5% in the same period in 2022. The labor force participation rate, which also includes people who were actively seeking jobs, hit 40.4% for people with disabilities, up 1.7%.
Both numbers were high-water marks, says John O’Neill, PhD, Director of the Center for Employment and Disability Research at Kessler, which tracks employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). “We’ve been through a period of time since COVID where both the proportion of the U.S. population that is employed and labor force participation rates have steadily increased,” he says.
Despite the U.S. Federal Reserve raising interest rates in 2023 to their highest levels in decades, the U.S. labor market has remained remarkably resilient. The workforce added an eye-popping 336,000 jobs in September, and grew by another 150,000 jobs in October, less than many economists were expecting but still a strong showing. “In recent months, jobs increased almost entirely because more people were seeking work,” says KPMG Chief Economist Diane Swonk. “The participation rate among the disabled has risen quite dramatically, and that’s where we got some of our additional labor force from. That’s great. It has helped the labor market normalize without a major rise in unemployment.”
Yet no one in the disability community believes that stigma or employment discrimination against people with disabilities has ended. Barry Kolanowski’s experience is testament to that. Kolanowski (featured in photo) was the 68-year-old CEO of a nonprofit organization serving senior citizens outside Chicago when he had a stroke in 2021. After vocational rehabilitation at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, he was ready to return to work. When he showed up at his office, he was called into a meeting and told that he was being “retired.” “My goal was to get up and have as normal a life as possible. I had no inkling I was going to be shown the door. I walked out of there with no income.”
After months of trying to find an equivalent job, Kolanowski’s employment counselor suggested he set his sights lower and apply for jobs as an administrative assistant. He sent out over 100 resumes and heard back from about 10 employers. But several times when he showed up for interviews, the job requirements would change and become much more physically demanding. Kolanowski, who says he “walks ugly,” believes that was done intentionally to discourage him. “How much was ageism? How much was my disability? Who knows,” he says. Fortunately, Kolanowski was hired in April 2023 by the New Hope United Methodist Church in West Chicago where his main role is to prepare a weekly PowerPoint presentation that accompanies the pastor’s sermon. “I’m so grateful they saw an opportunity for me,” he says. “I still feel like I have something to contribute.”
Kolanowski’s return to work is just a tiny part of the wave of higher employment for people with disabilities since the pandemic swept the U.S. in 2020.
Many companies are still struggling to find enough workers and that has helped boost employment of people with disabilities. As firms searched for untapped pools of workers, many changed their policies about flexible work arrangements, including allowing people to work from home. That made it possible for many people with mobility issues or chronic diseases characterized by fatigue to stay employed or find jobs. “We did a survey of supervisors in 2017 and then in the spring of 2022 as we were coming out of COVID and we found there were more employers using accommodations and they were using them for people with long COVID,” O’Neill says, referring to the long-term effects of the viral infection. “Employers may have become more sensitized to being flexible if they wanted to keep their employees.”
Still, some disability advocates fear that the employment wave might be peaking. “We’re still hitting new highs but there appears to be some leveling off,” O’Neill says. In fact, in October, employment of people with disabilities held steady at 37.2%, the same as a month earlier. For people without disabilities, the proportion of the U.S. population that is employed also remained the same but at the much higher rate of 75.2%.
The question going forward, economists say, is will the U.S. economy tip into recession, an economic downturn characterized by rising unemployment? If so, some of the people with disabilities hired in recent years could be among the first to lose their jobs since they will have less seniority than other workers. But there is some data that suggests that employers will want to hold on to the talent and loyalty of their workers with disabilities when the next downturn comes. In 2020, when companies and small businesses were drastically downsizing or closing because of the pandemic, the labor participation rate share of workers with disabilities stayed stable, according to O’Neill, dipping to 33% from 35%. Meanwhile, the participation rate for those without disabilities dropped much more sharply. “That persistence was interesting,” O’Neill says. “It makes me hopeful.”