It’s Time to Expand How We Think About Disability and Employment

Employment, safety, violence and justice are more connected than we often acknowledge.

Every October, National Disability Employment Awareness Month invites us to recognize the contributions of people with disabilities to our workplaces and economy. This year’s theme, Celebrating Value and Talent, has me thinking of another word: opportunity.

People with disabilities have always had talent. What far too many people still lack is equitable access to employment. Only about 38% of working-age people with disabilities are employed, compared with nearly 75% of people without disabilities.

We usually talk about that gap as an employment problem. It is. But after spending much of my career working at the intersections of disability, violence, and incarceration, I think we need to understand it as something more.

Employment, disability, safety, violence, and incarceration are deeply connected—and those connections run in multiple directions.

That means we need to think differently in both directions: employment has to become part of our safety and justice strategies, and employment supports for survivors and people impacted by incarceration have to account for disability.

Employment can provide income, stability, relationships, resources, and options that matter when someone is trying to stay safe, leave an abusive situation, return home after incarceration, or rebuild after a crisis. When people with disabilities have dramatically less access to employment in the first place, they have less access to those resources and options, too.

At the same time, experiencing violence can jeopardize employment.

That is true for any survivor. Getting safe means court dates, medical appointments, counseling, relocation, disrupted transportation, and time away from work. But disability adds another layer. A survivor may also rely on accessible transportation, personal assistance, communication access, workplace accommodations, or other supports that make employment possible. Violence can disrupt those supports along with everything else.

For some people, that connection is particularly direct. A person with a disability may rely on a personal care attendant to get out of bed, get dressed, eat, or leave home. If that attendant becomes abusive, getting safe may also mean losing the assistance that makes getting to work possible.

That isn’t simply a violence issue or an employment issue. It’s both.

The connections extend to exploitation and trafficking. Economic vulnerability can limit a person’s options and increase dependence on other people. For people with disabilities—who already encounter significant barriers to employment—efforts to prevent and respond to trafficking need to account for economic opportunity, disability-related supports, and the ways lack of opportunity can be exploited.

And then there is incarceration.

Economic instability can increase the likelihood of contact with systems that criminalize poverty, homelessness, and survival. At the same time, incarceration itself creates another barrier to employment. When people return home with a criminal record, they often encounter employers unwilling to hire them.

For people with disabilities, those barriers can stack on top of one another: a criminal record, disability discrimination, inaccessible applications and interviews, transportation barriers, gaps in services and supports, and difficulty securing accommodations.

Again, these aren’t separate problems.

That’s why we need to work in both directions.

If we want people with disabilities to be safe, free, and able to remain in their communities, expanding access to meaningful employment must be part of our safety and justice strategies.

And if we support survivors of violence, trafficking, or people impacted by incarceration, employment must be part of our advocacy and support. But it can’t be generic employment assistance. We have to understand the disability context: accessibility, accommodations, transportation, personal assistance, communication access, benefits, discrimination, and the other factors that determine whether employment is actually possible and sustainable.

None of this means that having a job prevents violence or incarceration. Nor should anyone’s value be measured by whether they work.

It means something simpler: people’s lives don’t fit into the separate boxes our systems have created for them.

Disability employment work needs a safety and justice lens. Violence prevention and survivor advocacy need an employment and disability lens. Reentry work needs both.

Celebrating value and talent is important. Creating opportunity is essential.

If we want people with disabilities to be safer and freer, we need to expand access to meaningful employment, and build survivor, diversion and reentry, and employment systems that recognize how these parts of people’s lives connect.