Self-employment for Disabled Individuals
The Issues
To put things simply, the issues are unemployment and underemployment. For those that might not be familiar with the second term, while unemployment means you are not working at all, underemployment means you are working but for far less than your skills would suggest you should be earning, not being promoted at the same rate as your peers, or not getting the same sort of hours as your peers.
The stats are often staggering. According to the National Council of State Legislatures, the unemployment rate for individuals with disabilities was 9.2% in 2019 (when the economy was still healthy), compared to 4.2% for those without. The amount of people working part-time positions was also pretty staggering at 32% compared to just 17%. Perhaps most staggering was the labor force participation rate, which showed that 80% of individuals with disabilities were not employed or looking for work, compared to just 20% of those without. While part of this can be explained away by some individuals not being able to maintain gainful employment, that hardly explains away everything.
Underemployment outside of part-time work is often harder to really put numbers on. I feel a lot of this is because it is a bit subjective, but a lot of it is also because it is less of a concern for the government to find out who is underemployed. Putting numbers on the quantity of hours a person is working is pretty easy, figuring out if someone is working at all is a bit harder than one might expect but still pretty easy, trying to figure out if someone is getting promoted at the same rate as their peers, or is in the type of employment that they should be, is quite a bit harder and often less of a governmental issue.
A Potential Solution
A solution that many disabled individuals and governmental officials have come up with is self-employment. If you cannot find anyone willing to hire you, skip the middleman and just go into business for yourself. While this obviously isn’t always an ideal solution, and there always needs to be more done to stop discrimination and give individuals the same opportunities that other have, creating businesses for oneself can help many out of chronic unemployment in the present.
Several states have come up with programs to help individuals with disabilities become entrepreneurs. Starting in 2012, three states: Florida, Alaska, and New York, started proof of concept programs called START-UP (state name). While they were not entirely the same, they all involved certain common features. First, they all involved cooperation between certain governmental agencies (vocational habilitation, small business administration, and department of labor), local advocacy groups, and universities. They also all developed strategies to specially work with the individual and help them be able to gain everything they needed to start up.
The Results
The study ended in 2014 which led to the United States Department of Labor writing up a bit on the results that they had seen. One key difference between how the states were thinking about doing this going into the program, and when they were leaving it, is just a mindset change. Most of these state agencies had never considered this type of employment before. Most of these state agencies also did not realize how much assistance this would take for people who had never had businesses before. Perhaps, most harmfully, people with disabilities themselves had never considered this a possibility before because of their own negative mindset. These problems and others required a change of both mindset and infrastructure to accomplish their goals, which all the state grantees saw.
However, a great deal of actual success was hard to come by because of how short the program ran for. Most first-time entrepreneurs need more than two years to start showing success, and there was no real reason to expect these entrepreneurs to be any different. So, most of the success that was recorded was either developing a business plan, or deciding to pursue wage employment after all. Though it is important to note in each state at least a few of the people involved had gotten to the point where they were filing federal business tax returns, which the study considered the final showing of viability. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any information about what happened after this study was over.
They then had 12 recommendations for future programs who seek to help disabled individuals become successful entrepreneurs. While I can’t speak to every one of them, they fell into three main categories. First, policies needed to be aligned across all levels to make this feasible. A lot of this dealt with certain federal systems like Medicaid and SSI going away as soon as the disabled individual gained money to start a business. Likewise, they needed more cross-system collaboration. Lastly, they felt they needed to get systems in the place for the future to have more public-private cooperation to get what was needed more easily.
These led to a bi-partisan task force in 2016 to come up with a framework for this sort of movement in every state. They came up with a dual pronged approach to do this in the future. First, make sure workforce development programs are aware of the possibility of self-employment, and start trying to make it work. The second step was to make it easier at a state level to get all forms and stuff in place. At least 29 states have followed this method to some degree, though most states seem to have gone with the second option, and not many have gone with the first yet.
Text Sources:
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/odep/pdf/2014startup.pdf
Image Sources:
https://www.facebook.com/diabledentrepreneurs.bw/photos/a.778984638871496/156207142056281
https://www.stutteringkingbakery.com/about