Making it easier for people with disabilities to work

Our society highly values productive employed citizens, and there is an ever-present pressure to lower public assistance costs such as Medicaid. People with disabilities disproportionately rely on these types of programs to cover their health care and other services. A 2009 Stapleton and Liu study showed that expenditures were four times higher for people with disabilities than for those without, per capita. A 2015 study by the Lead Center posited that employment programs might be one way to lower these costs, based on a lot of statistical analyses that showed that employment is correlated with improved health outcomes.

However, if this is the case, why is it so hard for people with disabilities who are highly motivated to work to get jobs? This is a complicated question with a lot of answers. One answer is that there is always pressure on middle management to 'get the most” out of their employees to improve company profits. That basically means that people with disabilities are often not a viable option since they may not be able to work at as fast a rate or multitask as well as people without disabilities. Often, though, this corporate mantra to 'get the most” out of employees leads to employee dissatisfaction, burnout, and a high turnover rate which ultimately costs more for the company as they have to train more new employees. While people with disabilities may take a little longer to be trained, or may not be able to do as many tasks as a person without disabilities, if given an opportunity to work are often more motivated to keep jobs since they have to work harder than the average person to get jobs.

One other barrier to people with disabilities obtaining employment is that a lot of people just don't believe they are capable of working. In a lot of cases, people with disabilities need only small, free or inexpensive accommodations to be able to perform quality work for their employers. Accommodations can be anything from moving chairs around in an office so that a person in a wheelchair can get through, to splitting one job into two positions. An example of this is a person who is intellectually disabled who could perform repetitive tasks like folding clothes or sorting items while freeing up other employees to assist customers. In this scenario, maybe the company would normally have four employees who perform all tasks working a shift, but they could make do with three if one was doing all the non-customer service tasks while the two others are totally devoted to customer service. This model is already being utilized by various companies, and is a great example for other companies who are trying to find a good fit for employees with disabilities.

If we are constantly telling people who use public assistance to work if they can and lessen the burden on taxpayers, then we need to examine our own behaviors and policies and make it possible for such people to find jobs. I have worked with people with disabilities for over three years, and I have seen how important it is for them to find work that is meaningful to them and where they feel valued. Most people with disabilities want to contribute to society and don't want to be handed everything.

' Laura Jackson, of Cedar Rapids, grew up in Iowa and received her master's degree in social work from The University of Iowa.