Disability-based labour market inequalities

Disability remains a significant hurdle on the labour market, resulting in fewer and often worse employment opportunities. In this ETUI working paper, David Pettinicchio and Michelle Maroto delve deeper into this issue, exploring how structures organizing society and work affect disability-based inequalities.

Pettinicchio and Maroto show overall and cross-national trends and highlight the evidence from times of crisis as well as the recent pandemic, which has exacerbated disparities. They make the case for a proactive role for unions, who are a key actor in helping to reduce this inequality, as has been shown in several countries with different systems. In countries with stronger union presence such as the United States or United Kingdom, union membership has been shown to be particularly beneficial for individual disabled workers in boosting their wages.

Abstract

Despite changing attitudes around disability over time, people with disabilities still face large barriers to labour market participation. We apply a sociological framework that considers both supply- and demand-side explanations for labour market inequality to help understand the continuing earnings and employment disparities experienced by people with disabilities across countries. Specifically, we review reemployment disparities across different measures of disability, address sets of individual-level and structural explanations for these disparities, discuss how these explanations interact, and apply them to examples related to intersectionality, unionisation, contingent work, and employment in times of crisis. Paid employment is central to people’s social and economic wellbeing within liberal market-based economies, making it important to understand the many dimensions of labour market inequality.

David Pettinicchio and Michelle Maroto