Disability and labor market outcomes in the United States: Exploring the linkage between disability, education, and labor market earnings

Disabled individuals have long faced social and physical barriers to entering the U.S. labor force. The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a key piece of civil rights legislation for the disabled community, aimed to curb the discrimination in hiring and employment practices, and to improve labor market outcomes for disabled workers. This study seeks to investigate the link between disabilities and the social ability to be equally successful as non-disabled individuals in the U.S. labor market, particularly examining the relationships between disability, educational attainment, and labor market outcomes. Using disability supplementary data from the January 2009 Current Population Survey produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this study finds a substantial and statistically significant negative impact of having a disability on the social ability to secure equal wage rates in the job marketplace: workers with a disability, on average, earned approximately 21 percent less in weekly wages than their non-disabled counterparts, holding other factors constant. When incorporating the interactive effects of disability on education, the effect of education on wages is also conditioned by the fact that disability status affects the level of education, and this relationship is statistically significant. These findings support the existing body of literature on disability in the United States in suggesting that the ADA is simply not sufficient in leveling the proverbial playing field for employed individuals whose disabilities require actual accommodation. Significant areas of further research using this data would include executing comparisons amongst disability types and labor market outcomes; a better understanding of disability discrimination and social handicaps could result refinements and improvements of both ADA policy and inclusion programs to mitigate this added burden on disabled individuals.