In order to advance economic security for people with disabilities, policymakers must level the playing field for disabled workers while also guaranteeing access to housing, nutrition, and health care for those who are unable to work.
Introduction and summary
Author’s notes: This report is an update of a 2015 issue brief from the Center for American Progress titled “A Fair Shot for Workers with Disabilities.”1
The disability community is rapidly evolving to using identity-first language in place of person-first language. This is because it views disability as being a core component of identity, much like race and gender. Some members of the community, such as people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, prefer person-first language. In this report, the terms are used interchangeably.
In recent years, lawmakers have increasingly recognized the urgent need to break down barriers to employment, upward mobility, and economic security for people with disabilities. Persistently high poverty rates and a shifting political climate have triggered a new wave of progressive legislative proposals to raise wages and integrate employees with disabilities into the workforce. While these practical solutions will do much to alleviate disproportionately high poverty rates for working-age people with disabilities, they are only a first step. In order to transform the U.S. economic system so that it meets the needs of all people with disabilities, policymakers must dismantle the structural barriers facing disabled workers and disrupt the myth of self-sufficiency on which the system is grounded.
The current economic structure was not designed to support people with disabilities who cannot and will never be entirely self-sufficient. As explained by Emory University Professor Martha Fineman, the “autonomy myth” has produced institutional arrangements that ignore the biological reality that all humans will be dependent at some point in their lives.2 This ideological framework “treats dependency as private matters with which the state has no legitimate concern.”3 A derivative of this myth is the long-held stereotype that people with disabilities, women and people with other marginalized gender identities, people of color, and those at the intersection of these identities are burdensome to society and, as a result, are only deserving of the full range of benefits available to their more privileged peers if they can prove their economic worth.4 These stereotypes lie at the root of federal policies that economically disadvantage disabled workers.