Abstract
Workplace inflexibility contributes to the higher rates of job loss and unemployment experienced by disabled people. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries already had significant disability employment gaps. Based on evidence from previous recessions, the global recession resulting from the pandemic is likely to have a severer and longer-lasting impact on the employment of disabled workers compared with non-disabled workers. In the UK, there is already evidence that the disability employment gap has widened since the pandemic. On the other hand, the pandemic initiated increased access to home-working, a change in working arrangements that may prove beneficial to disabled workers employed in desk-based roles. Home-working can increase the accessibility of employment and support work retention for disabled workers, yet pre-pandemic many employers had withheld it. Studies of employees’ and employers’ experiences of home-working during the pandemic have indicated a desire to retain access to home-working in the future. A permanent cultural shift to increased access to home-working would help address the disability employment gap for desk-based workers. However, disabled workers are over-represented in jobs not conducive to home-working, and in sectors that have been hardest hit by business closures during the pandemic, so the position of many disabled workers is likely to remain precarious.
Highlights
COVID-19 was first identified in China in December 2019, and was announced as a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global recession that has both increased unemployment and widened the disability employment gap in the UK, a trend that has been observed in the USA [16] and is likely to be mirrored in many other countries
Recessions increase competitiveness for jobs and can encourage more selective recruitment; in the current context there is a risk that employers will be deterred from recruiting disabled workers and workers with long-term health conditions who need to shield during further waves of COVID-19 [59]
Summary
COVID-19 was first identified in China in December 2019, and was announced as a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. As well as experiencing high COVID-19 mortality rates, disabled people and people with long-term health conditions (hereafter referred to as ‘disabled people’ for brevity) are likely to experience more severe disadvantage in the labour market than other groups as a result of the pandemic. Disabilities 2021, 1 growth in unemployment; based on evidence from previous recessions, disabled workers will be hit the hardest, widening employment inequity between them and the rest of the population [4]. This article reflects on the employment prospects of disabled workers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It largely focuses on the UK context, given the ubiquity of the issues raised it will have resonance in other settings
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