First Fired, Last Hired, and Lower Paid: Re-employment Outcomes Among Displaced Workers With Disabilities, 2007–2021

In their chapter for Disability and the Future of Work, Michelle Maroto and David Pettinicchio analyze the inequitable labour market outcomes that workers with disabilities face, which include higher rates of displacement, longer gaps between jobs, and pay disparities.

David Pettinicchio is CGSP-affiliated faculty and the Principal Investigator of the Disability-Based Inequalities research project.

Citation

Maroto, M., Pettinicchio, D., Blanck, P., Hyseni, F., Schur, L., & Kruse, D. (2025). First Fired, Last Hired, and Lower Paid: Re-employment Outcomes Among Displaced Workers With Disabilities, 2007–2021. In Disability and the Future of Work (Vol. 16, pp. 25–42). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-354720250000016003

Abstract

People with disabilities continue to face significant barriers in the labor market. They are also more likely to experience job displacement, involuntary job loss typically resulting from broader exogenous forces (e.g., automation, economic downturns) that make workers no longer needed. What happens to displaced workers with disabilities? Do they find new jobs, and if they do, what jobs are they? We study re-employment outcomes among displaced workers with disabilities using data from the 2010, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2020, and 2022 waves of the Current Population Survey Displaced Worker Supplement. We find that in addition to higher rates of displacement, workers with disabilities took longer to be re-employed than workers without disabilities with a decreased hazard for re-employment of about 30%. For those who found new jobs, earnings losses upon re-employment were 18% greater for people with disabilities when compared to those without disabilities. Although the relationship between disability and time to re-employment did not vary significantly over time, earnings differences between people with and without disabilities were smaller during the pandemic.