Disability and occupational projections

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 133, Issue 10, 2010, Pages

  Kruse, Douglas ^a,b   Schur, Lisa ^c   Ali, Mohammad ^c  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH   (United States)

^c RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 78149322330     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. See Douglas Kruse and Lisa Schur, "Employment of People with Disabilities Following the ADA," Industrial Relations, January 2003, pp. 31-66.
2. David C. Stapleton, and Richard Burkhauser (eds.), The Decline in the Employment of People with Disabilities: A Policy Puzzle (Kalamazoo, MI, W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2003).
3. Edward H. Yelin and Laura Trupin, "Disability and the characteristics of employment," Monthly Labor Review, May 2003, pp. 20-31.
4. StatsRRTC, Annual Disability Statistics Compendium, 2009 (New York, Hunter College, Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Disability Demographics and Statistics 2009), on the Internet at www.disabilitycompendium.org (visited Oct. 21, 2010).
5. Economic News Release: Table A-6, "Employment Status of the Civilian Population by sex, age, and disability status, not seasonally adjusted" (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Oct. 8, 2010), on the Internet at www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t06.htm (visited Oct. 19, 2010). Working age is defined as 16 to 64 years.
6. See Douglas Kruse, "Persons with disabilities: Demographic, income, and health care characteristics, 1993," Monthly Labor Review, September 1998, pp. 13-22.
7. Lisa Schur, "Dead-end Jobs or a Path to Economic Well-being? The Consequences of Non-standard Work among People with Disabilities," Behavioral Sciences and the Law, December 2002, pp. 601-20.
8. Phoebe Ball, Michael Morris, Johnette Hartnette, and Peter Blanck, "Breaking the Cycle of Poverty: Asset Accumulation by People with Disabilities," Disability Studies Quarterly, winter 2006, on the Internet at www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/652/829 (visited Oct. 21, 2010).
9. StatsRRTC, Annual Disability Statistics Compendium, 2009.
10. See 2004 Survey of Americans with Disabilities (New York, National Organization on Disability/Louis Harris and Associates, 2004), p. 43.
11. Mohammad Ali, Lisa Schur, and Peter Blanck, "What Types of Jobs Do People with Disabilities Want?" Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, forthcoming, March 2011, on the Internet as of Oct. 5, 2010, at www.springerlink.com/content/105365/?Content+Status=Accepted (visited Oct. 24, 2010).
12. See Thomas Hale, Howard Hayghe, and John McNeil, "Persons with disabilities: Labor market activity, 1994," Monthly Labor Review, September 1998, pp. 3-12.
13. Kruse, "Persons with disabilities"
14. Yelin and Trupin, "Disability and the characteristics of employment"
15. Schur, "Dead-end Jobs"
16. Marjorie L. Baldwin and Edward J. Schumacher, "A Note on Job Mobility among Workers with Disabilities," Industrial Relations, July 2002, pp. 430-41.
17. Marjorie L. Baldwin and William G. Johnson, "A Critical Review of Studies of Discrimination against Workers with Disabilities," in William M. Rodgers III (ed.), Handbook on the Economics of Discrimination (Northampton, MA, Edgar Elgar Publishing, 2006), pp. 119-60.
18. Lisa Schur, Douglas Kruse, Joseph Blasi, and Peter Blanck, "Is Disability Disabling in All Workplaces? Workplace Disparities and Corporate Culture," Industrial Relations, July 2009, pp. 381-410.
19. StatsRRTC, Annual Disability Statistics Compendium, 2009
20. Yelin and Trupin, "Disability and the characteristics of employment," p. 28.
21. See Hale, Hayghe, and McNeil, "Persons with disabilities"
22. Yelin and Trupin, "Disability and the characteristics of employment."
23. T. Alan Lacey and Benjamin Wright, "Occupational employment projections to 2018," Monthly Labor Review, November 2009, pp. 82-123.
24. For further information on the ACS, see "American Community Survey" (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009), on the Internet at www.census.gov/acs/www (visited Oct. 21, 2010).
25. The six questions are as follows: 1. "Is this person deaf or does he/she have serious difficulty hearing?" 2. "Is this person blind or does he/she have serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses?" 3. "Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does this person have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?" 4. "Does this person have serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs?" 5. "Does this person have difficulty dressing or bathing?" 6.
26. "Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does this person have difficulty doing errands alone such as visiting a doctor's office or shopping?" The design and testing of the questions are described in Matthew Brault, Sharon Stern, and David Raglin, Evaluation Report Covering Disability, 2006 American Community Survey Content Test report P.4 (U.S. Census Bureau, Jan. 3, 2007), on the Internet at www.census.gov/acs/www/AdvMeth/content_test/P4_Disability.pdf (visited Oct. 21, 2010).
27. For further documentation, see Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey: Demographics (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Sept. 10, 2010), on the Internet at www.bls.gov/cps/demographics.htm#disability (visited Oct. 21, 2010).
28. For the current article, a positive answer to any question indicates a disability, a positive answer to question 1 indicates a hearing impairment, a positive answer to question 2 indicates a vision impairment, a positive answer to question 3 indicates a cognitive impairment, and a positive answer to question 4 indicates a mobility impairment
29. See Brault, Stern, and Raglin, Evaluation Report Covering Disability, p. 4.
30. Of the 469 occupations in the ACS, 13 had sample sizes less than 100. Those occupations are identified in footnotes when they appear in the tables.
31. The data on specific occupations include median earnings as reported in the BLS occupational projections. Where the occupations were aggregated to match those of the ACS, no median could be calculated, so footnotes report the median earnings for each of the occupations forming the aggregated occupation.
32. The probit regression predicted employment with the independent variables of disability, age, and age squared, and with dummies for the education, race, and ethnicity categories presented in table 1
33. Using the 10 occupational categories in table 2, the multinomial logit regression predicted occupational distribution with the independent variables of disability, age, and age squared, and with dummies for the education, race, and ethnicity categories presented in table 1
34. Lacey and Wright, "Occupational employment projections."
35. The 20 fastest growing occupations shown in the table are slightly different from those presented in Lacey and Wright, because of the different aggregation of some occupations in the ACS. For example, the third-fastest growing occupation presented by Lacey and Wright is home health aides, but the ACS combines data on that occupation with data on nursing and psychiatric aides, who have a lower growth rate, so the combined occupation ranks number 15 in table 4.
36. The combined 2002-08 National Health Interview Surveys, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, show that 40.7 percent of working-age people who are "blind or unable to see at all" are employed, holding jobs in a wide range of occupations. (The top five are administrative support, management, sales, business and financial operations, and production). Thanks go to Steve Kaye for these calculations.
37. The site is on the Internet at online.onetcenter.org/help/online/accom (visited Oct. 21, 2010).
38. In what follows, the term "required" is used somewhat loosely. Although many employers do in fact require certain levels of education or training for numerous occupations, many others do not, but still look favorably on those who attain such levels or receive such training, tending to hire or promote these workers more often. The use of the term "required" in this article is intended to capture both situations.
39. Christine Jolls, "Identifying the Effects of the Americans with Disabilities Act Using State-Law Variation: Preliminary Evidence on Educational Participation Effects," American Economic Review, May 2004, pp. 447-53.
40. Authors' calculations
41. See Lisa Schur, "Barriers or Opportunities? The Causes of Contingent and Part-time Work among People with Disabilities," Industrial Relations, October 2003, pp. 589-622.
42. Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse, Non-standard Work Arrangements and Disability Income, Report to the Disability Research Institute (Urbana-Champaign, IL, University of Illinois, 2002)
43. Empowerment of Americans with Disabilities: Breaking Barriers to Careers and Full Employment (Washington, DC, National Council on Disability, 2007), on the Internet at www.ncd.gov/newsroom/publications/2007/pdf/ncd94_Employment_20071001.pdf (see especially pp. 105-18; visited Oct. 21, 2010).
44. Figures for part-time workers by occupation were calculated from the 2008 ACS, based on those who usually work less than 35 hours per week. The percentages of home-based workers by occupation also were calculated from the 2008 ACS, in which respondents were asked "How did this person usually get to work last week?" and the answer was "Worked at home." This is clearly a restrictive measure of home-based work, not counting the workers who do some, but not all, of their work at home. The estimates obtained assume that the percentage of jobs that are part time or home based stays constant within each occupation over the next decade.
45. The overall percentage of workers responding "Work at home" to the ACS question about commuting was 4.1 percent, less than the 14.9 percent reporting that they did at least some home-based work in 2004, among whom about half (47 percent) said that they were doing paid work at home.
46. See "Work at Home in 2004," news release USDOL 05-1768 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Sept. 22, 2005).
47. Alan Krueger and Douglas Kruse, Labor Market Effects of Spinal Cord Injuries in the Dawn of the Computer Age, Working Paper No. 5302 (National Bureau of Economic Research, October 1995).
48. Douglas Kruse, Alan Krueger, and Susan Drastal, "Computer Use, Computer Training, and Employment Outcomes among People with Spinal Cord Injuries," Spine, April 1996, pp. 891-96.
49. Schur and Kruse, Non-standard Work Arrangements
50. Applying the prevalence of disability by sex and age category in the 2008 ACS to the projected population distribution by sex and age in 2018
51. see Mitra Toossi, "Labor force projections to 2018: older workers staying more active," Monthly Labor Review, November 2009, pp. 30-51, especially p. 35) indicates that the population 16 years and older with disabilities will increase by 5.8 million, or 16.6 percent, and the working-age (16 to 64 years) population with disabilities will increase by 1.8 million, or 8.9 percent.
52. As shown in table 3, the baseline projection of the current article is that the number of jobs for people with disabilities will increase by 825,000 million, or 9.0 percent. If the number of people 16 years and older with disabilities increases by 16.6 percent, then the percentage of all these people who are employed would clearly decline, but it is not obvious how the employment rate for working-age people with disabilities would be affected, because it is not known how many new jobs would be held by people of working age. If the age distribution among all workers with disabilities stays constant, then the percentage of working-age people with disabilities who are employed will stay constant. BLS projections, however, indicate that the workforce will be aging by 2018, with greater shares of workers in the 55-to-64-years and 65-years-and-older age categories.
53. (See Toossi, "Labor force projections to 2018," especially p. 44.).
54. In that case, to the extent that job growth among people with disabilities is concentrated among those 65 years and older, the percentage of working-age people with disabilities who are employed will decrease, but this reduction is at least partly counterbalanced by the increased share of workers ages 55-64 years, who have a higher disability rate than younger workers and will therefore contribute to an increase in the percentage of working-age people with disabilities who are employed (implying that the disability rate may not stay constant within occupations, as is assumed in the analysis presented herein)
55. Empowerment of Americans, especially pp. 73-118.
56. See Adrienne Colella, "Organizational Socialization of Newcomers with Disabilities: A Framework for Future Research," Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, vol. 14, 1996, pp. 351-417.
57. Dianna Stone and Adrienne Colella, "A Model of Factors Affecting the Treatment of Disabled Individuals in Organizations," Academy of Management Review, April 1996, pp. 352-401.
58. Lisa Schur, Douglas Kruse, and Peter Blanck, "Corporate Culture and the Employment of People with Disabilities," Behavioral Sciences and the Law, January/February 2005, pp. 3-20.
59. Lacey and Wright, "Occupational employment projections to 2018," especially p. 88.