Will Disabled Workers Be Winners or Losers in the Post-COVID-19 Labour Market?

Paula Holland
Additional contact information
Paula Holland: Division of Health Research, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YW, UK

Disabilities, 2021, vol. 1, issue 3, 1-13

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.

Keywords: employment; disability employment gap; employers; home-working; reasonable adjustments; COVID-19; inequities; economic recession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7272/1/3/13/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7272/1/3/13/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jdisab:v:1:y:2021:i:3:p:13-173:d:591289

Access Statistics for this article

Disabilities is currently edited by Ms. Cici Zhou

More articles in Disabilities from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().