October continues to perplex me.
Every year, National Disability Employment Awareness Month arrives with familiar language about inclusion, opportunity, and celebrating the contributions of people with disabilities in the workforce. Those contributions deserve recognition. But after more than eight decades of formally recognizing our capacity to work, what exactly are we still celebrating?
The observance began in 1945 as National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week. A week became a month. Disability rights became civil rights. The Americans with Disabilities Act became law. An entire infrastructure of vocational rehabilitation agencies, workforce programs, and nonprofit organizations grew up around helping people with disabilities work.
Yet the economic disparity remains. The question has never been whether people with disabilities can work. We can, we do, and we have. The question is whether the institutions built to facilitate our employment have produced anything approaching economic equality.
The numbers demand that question. In 2025, only 38.1% of working-age people with disabilities were employed, compared with 74.8% of people without disabilities. Our unemployment rate was 8.8$, more than double the 4.1% rate for people without disabilities. Among 17.4 million working-age Americans with disabilities, that gap has held for years, through funding increases, awareness campaigns, and program expansions.
The federal Vocational Rehabilitation State Grants program is the largest dedicated public investment in disability employment, distributing more than $4 billion annually to state agencies. In 2023, more than 115,000 people with disabilities obtained competitive integrated employment through VR, most with significant disabilities. These are real outcomes. But billions invested and nearly a million people served annually should not still leave a 36-point employment gap untouched. Individual placements can succeed while the underlying disparity remains structurally enormous.
The Outlook in New York
New York City is an uncomfortable case study. A 2024 analysis by the city Comptroller found that the employment rate of people with disabilities was half that of nondisabled New Yorkers. A follow-up review released in July 2026 shows what that gap looks like on the ground: NYC: ATWORK, the city’s flagship disability employment program, served 1,268 people and helped 99 obtain jobs over two years—less than 4% of the roughly 35,350 New Yorkers with disabilities reportedly seeking work. This is not an indictment of ATWORK’s six staff members confronting an enormous problem. City officials testified the program needs at least seven more just to meet existing demand. It is an indictment of what the city has decided constitutes sufficient investment.
Even when placement happens, the job itself often reproduces the hierarchy. People with disabilities are overrepresented in service, sales, and office occupations, and underrepresented in management: 37.5% of us work in management, professional, and related occupations, compared with 43.9% of workers without disabilities. We are also nearly twice as likely to work part time, which quietly limits benefits, income, and advancement even for someone technically counted as “employed.”
At the furthest edge of this hierarchy sits Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which still allows employers to pay disabled workers less than minimum wage. As of November 2024, nearly 40,000 people with disabilities were working under 14(c) certificates, according to the Government Accountability Office, averaging $4.15 an hour; more than half earned less than $3.50. A federal proposal to phase out the certificates was withdrawn in 2025. This is not a relic. It is current law, and it contradicts everything October claims to stand for.
So when we announce that another person with a disability has been “placed,” I want to know more. What are they earning? Do they have benefits? Is the job full-time? Is there a path to promotion? Five years later, are they supervising anyone, directing a budget, or sitting at the table where institutional decisions are made?
A job is not automatically economic justice.
Lacking in Representation
That distinction gets more uncomfortable when the organizations in question are the ones built to serve us. In February, I wrote in Able News about the hierarchy operating inside our own institutions. Employment data confirms it operates at the top as well. Candid research on the nonprofit sector found that 10% of nonprofits have a CEO with a disability—a share that drops to 3% among the largest organizations, even as it holds at 20% among the smallest. Representation shrinks exactly where power concentrates. If an organization receives money to address disability unemployment and publishes its placement numbers, it should also tell us how many people with disabilities it employs, what they earn, and how many hold executive authority. Otherwise, institutions can prosper by addressing disability unemployment without ever being required to eliminate disability economic inequality.
October should become more than awareness. After 81 years, awareness is an extraordinarily low bar.
Measure wages. Measure benefits. Measure hours. Measure promotions. Measure leadership. Fund programs like ATWORK at a level that matches the population they exist to serve, not the level a budget office finds convenient. End the subminimum wage. And require every organization that speaks the language of disability employment to report the economic outcomes of the people it claims to serve.
Celebrate us working. Absolutely.
But do not confuse our participation with our liberation.
Limiting choices, limits existence.
Marcus D. Johnson, CRC-CVE, LMHC, is a disability justice activist with more than two decades of experience advancing disability justice, disability-competent healthcare, and community inclusion. He is co-leader of the Civics League for Disability Rights and a longtime contributor to Able News, writing from lived experience of significant physical disability at the intersection of disability, policy, and systems change.
Opinions expressed are solely those of the writer(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Able News at The Viscardi Center and/or The Viscardi Center.