Author’s note: The disability community is rapidly evolving to use identity-centered language instead of person-centered language. This is because we believe that disability is a core element of identity, just like race or gender. Some members of the community, such as people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, prefer person-centered language. In this column, the terms are used interchangeably.
In November 2022, about 48,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) workers went on strike at schools in the University of California system. The UAW also represents student teaching assistants across the country. These workers, including student teaching assistants and researchers, demanded pay raises and improved working conditions, especially an environment that was more accessible to workers with disabilities than the schools offered. They ultimately succeeded in getting a clause in their contract to help workers with disabilities do their jobs.
Some people with disabilities require accommodations from their employers, i.e., adjustments to working conditions, to ensure that they have equal access to employment opportunities and can perform job duties to the same extent as workers without disabilities. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which collects and publishes data on workers with disabilities, includes a variety of “physical, mental, or emotional” conditions in the questions used to identify disabilities to reflect the lived experience of Americans. Meanwhile, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protects people who have a condition that “significantly limits one or more major life activities,” who have a record of having a disability in the past, or who are “perceived by others to have such a disability.” Regardless of how disability is defined, workers with disabilities face unique barriers that may make it difficult or impossible for them to obtain, retain, or advance in a position without accommodations.
The number of workers with disabilities will reach 7.5 million in 2022, an increase since 2020, and they face a variety of challenges in the workplace, from finding stable work to receiving equal pay and getting the accommodations they need to stay on the job. Research shows that unions not only increase the wages of workers with disabilities by 30%, but also reduce the wage gap between workers with and without disabilities, increase their retention rates, and help them have a voice in the workplace to secure accommodations. While all workers benefit from being able to join a union, unions especially help workers with disabilities overcome inequities in the workplace and support themselves and their families.
Disabled workers and the labour market
Workers with disabilities, especially women, earn less than non-disabled workers for the same work, with the average disabled worker earning 66 cents for every dollar earned by non-disabled workers. In some cases, federal laws reinforce the wage gap. For example, employers who certify under Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act are legally permitted to pay disabled workers less than the already low federal minimum wage. Disabled workers are also more likely to work part-time: 29% in 2021 compared to 16% of non-disabled workers. In addition, because assistance through government programs such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and Medicaid all impose earned income limits or penalties on income from other jobs, disabled workers face the complex problem that working extra hours can result in reduced benefits and therefore lower total income.
Unions are a means by which workers collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions, and workers with disabilities are about as likely to be union members as workers without disabilities. According to data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) for 2022 and January to June 2023 analyzed by the Center for American Progress, 9.4% of workers with disabilities are union members, slightly below the national union density of 10.1%. The majority of workers with disabilities are members of the working class. About 70% of workers with disabilities do not have a four-year college degree, and union members with disabilities are 67.2% more likely to have a four-year college degree than union members without disabilities, who are 54%. While these data reflect the best estimates of the community of union members with disabilities, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics acknowledges that surveys such as the CPS may underrepresent people with disabilities, so there may be many more workers with disabilities who are union members.
Unions benefit workers with disabilities
Research has long shown that unions benefit their members in a variety of ways, from higher wages and improved benefits to greater job security and improved training opportunities, and help reduce gender and racial wage and wealth gaps. This is true for workers with disabilities, with the added benefit of helping them secure changes to working conditions they need to do their jobs.
In addition, workers with disabilities enjoy a higher union wage premium than workers without disabilities. Because there is a wage gap between workers with disabilities and those without disabilities, this wage premium has the effect of narrowing the disability wage gap. Union contracts help establish a uniform wage standard for all workers who perform similar tasks in the workplace, reducing the room for employers to undercut wages. This ensures that all workers, whether they have a disability or not, enjoy the same base wage level. In fact, academic studies have shown that unions narrow the wage gap while raising wages for all workers. While workers without disabilities see a 15 percent increase in wages as a result of union membership, studies have found that this increase is doubled to 30 percent for workers with disabilities. (See Figure 1) As a result, the wage gap between workers with disabilities and those without disabilities has narrowed. Non-union workers with disabilities earn 13 percent less than workers without disabilities after controlling for other factors, while union members with disabilities only earned 3 percent less from 2009 to 2018.
Figure 1
Workers with disabilities face unique challenges in the labour market
In 2022, an average of 7.5 million Americans with disabilities were employed. However, many who want to work struggle to find work, and studies have shown that people with disabilities are much less likely to get a job than people without disabilities. From 2009 to 2021, the number of employed people relative to the total population was about three times that of people without disabilities. Many employers are reluctant to hire workers with disabilities, including in union-protected occupations, which creates additional obstacles. Among workers with disabilities who participated in the labor market in 2022, the unemployment rate, or the percentage of workers who are actively looking for work but cannot find it, was more than twice as high for workers with disabilities as for those without disabilities, and the COVID-19 pandemic has also led to millions of additional workers with chronic illnesses and disabilities due to long COVID. While labor unions play an important role in improving retention for all workers, policymakers should also consider a more comprehensive policy package for workers with disabilities, including providing additional funding to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, repealing the Fair Labor Standards Act’s 14(c) exemption that forces workers with disabilities to pay less than the minimum wage, reinforcing wage disparities, and expanding leave benefits.
Unions also help workers with disabilities secure accommodations. Accommodations are adjustments to the way regular job duties are performed, allowing workers with disabilities to get jobs and perform their jobs to the same extent as workers without disabilities. These are important to help workers with disabilities do their jobs, and for employers, they have the added benefit of increasing worker productivity and reducing the amount of money spent on training new employees and workers’ compensation claims. But many workers with disabilities struggle to ask for and get the accommodations they need to do their jobs. University of California workers who went on strike in November 2022 created a joint labor-management committee to identify accessibility needs, secured temporary job adjustments while accommodations were implemented, and won a contract that guaranteed eight weeks of paid leave for serious health conditions. All of this helps student workers with disabilities get the accommodations they need to keep their jobs now and in the future. Studies show that workers with disabilities have higher retention rates in union jobs, and unions are important to help workers with disabilities stay in the workforce, not just on the job. This is especially important when Because millions of workers will experience chronic illness or disability in their lifetimes (one in seven adults have experienced long-term COVID-19 since 2020), becoming disabled, even temporarily, can jeopardize a worker’s ability to support themselves and their family without adequate support from their employer. Because unions provide workers and management with a process to negotiate working conditions, they play a key role in navigating the process for disabled members to request accommodations to which they are legally entitled. In fact, academic research has shown that union membership makes workers more likely to request accommodations in the workplace, confirming that unions’ role in giving workers a voice in the workplace extends to the accommodation process. Additionally, workers across the country are striking for better health and safety protections.
Conclusion
Joining a labor union provides workers, including people with disabilities, with a path to the middle class. Collective bargaining allows workers to negotiate their way through the challenges that people with disabilities face in the labor market, including lower wages for similar work and the difficulty of obtaining and keeping stable work, and to improve wages and working conditions. However, fewer workers can access these benefits because of obstacles that prevent millions of workers across the country from exercising their right to join a labor union. Measures that make it easier to join a labor union, such as the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which strengthens penalties for union busting and provides greater protections for workers who try to organize their coworkers, and the Public Employees Freedom to Bargain Act, which proposes to strengthen the right to organize in the public sector, would help millions of Americans with disabilities achieve economic justice in the workplace.