Employment Changes - NDEAM

(Local View from 4'2, Lake County Press, October 17, 2025)

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month or NDEAM.

Finding accurate data about the different percentages of people with disabilities who are employed is tricky. After some general research I found that there are many different systems with many different data collection methods and many of them do not include the diversity of the population or are not accommodated so people with disabilities can accurately complete the surveys. Here are some thoughts I know to be true based on lived experience or observation or data that is being used and widely accepted within the disability community.

Over seven million disabled Americans go to work daily. Many disabled workers are self-employed, many times due to the need for work accommodations, barriers in access, or medical needs of working from home.  Workers with disabilities are twice as likely to be part-time compared to their full-time non-disabled counterparts. Unemployment rates are higher for disabled Americans for a variety of reasons, including inconsistent data collection.

Under current federal changes that just happened around October 11th, 2025, this data around disabled workers will only increase. Changes to the Department of Vocational Rehab alone will impact the access transitioning high school students through adults will have to needed services and opportunities. For me, Voc Rehab helped me finance the accommodations I needed for my music education undergrad. They paid for my second set of textbooks so I didn't have to carry more heavy bags and hurt my arms and hands. This way I had a set at my dwelling place and in my locker on campus. During my Master’s Degree they helped me cover a portion of tuition for one semester because I had forgotten that they were a resource. My Master’s was in Educational Technology Integration as I knew my career would need to pivot as my arthritis and physical needs were changing my career landscape.

These changes are heartbreaking and sickening at the outset. I have hope that as time goes on new strategies will show themselves and we will have healthier transformative change to our systems for people with disabilities. I have to have hope for better change otherwise it currently feels as if people with disabilities are being targeted and erased from our everyday society and future workforce. My heart and stomach can’t handle these thoughts or wonderings. 

So let’s focus on what we can do today. We can use resources like www.air.org which has tremendous resources for employment opportunities and workplace accommodation ideas and toolkits for people with disabilities. Or a new resource that I found in my research, Job Accommodation Network, www.askjan.org, has great toolkits, webinars, newsletters, and resources for employers and employees.

Our workforce needs to represent our society and communities. Everyone should have the right and access to be gainfully employed. Workspaces, transit, parking, attitudes and more can all be barriers in consistent employment. People with disabilities bring strengths and creativity to their work just like their non-disabled counterparts. To create these opportunities in our local communities we need to continue conversations, be resources for each other, and keep raising awareness with employers and employees alike.