The employment rate of people with disabilities, by Burt S. Barnow. 44 Monthly Labor Review • November 2008.

“Critical issues in evaluating employment policies for the disabled are the measurement of employment status, the measurement of disability status, and the question of which subpopulations of the disabled should be included; no clear consensus has emerged regarding the outcome of these issues, except that surveys must provide more comprehensive coverage.”

Promoting employment for people with disabilities has long been an important policy objective in the United States. Some examples of Federal policies whose goal is to increase employment for people with disabilities are the vocational rehabilitation system, funded by grants from the U.S. Rehabilitation Services Administration to the States; the Ticket to Work program; the Work Opportunity Tax Credit; and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Many of these policies are relatively new; yet analysts have noted a decline in the employment rate of people with disabilities in recent years,1 and some evaluations of the ADA indicate that, rather than increasing employment, the Act may have reduced employment for those with disabilities. These surprising findings have led some observers to take a closer look at employment statistics for such individuals. Perhaps, they argue, it is not that the programs and policies have failed to aid disabled individuals in finding employment; rather, the statistics themselves are misleading and inappropriate.