Tight job market a plus for workers with disabilities

Opportunities grow for ‘untapped talent pool’

Julie Propp landed her first-ever job about 18 months ago — at age 55.

A part-time retail helper at a Kwik Trip convenience store in Marshalltown, Iowa, Propp cleans and ensures coffee cups and other items are wellstocked. She previously loaded boxes in workshops run by agencies that help disabled people but never had a traditional job because of a developmental disability.

She prefers her current gig. “It’s more money down there and more hours,” says Propp, who earns $10.90 an hour and will soon get a bump to $11.25. “Some customers are so nice.”

With the low 4.1% unemployment rate making it tougher for employers to hire and retain workers, more are bringing on Americans with disabilities who had long struggled to find jobs. Many firms are modifying traditional interviews that filter out candidates with less-refined social skills and transferring some job duties to other staffers to accommodate the strengths of people with disabilities.

“In a tight labor market, employers who usually might not hire some of these people are reaching (deeper) in the queue,” says Harry Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University.

Kwik Trip launched its program to place people with disabilities in retail helper jobs in 2013. About half of the company’s 634 stores in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin have such workers. Turnover for retail helpers was just 9% last year compared to 45% for all part-time employees, says Joalyn Torgerson, Kwik Trip’s return-to-work coordinator.

Propp is “always looking for more stuff she can do,” store Manager Sheila Earney says.

Advocates for people with disabilities say recognition of their value in the workplace is long overdue, and they hope employers’ current hiring need spurs a more enduring shift. The share of working Americans who are disabled was 3.2% last year, but that was up modestly from a range of 2.9% to 3.1% from

2011 to 2016, according to the Labor Department.

“There’s a growing cadre of companies that look at people with disabilities as an untapped talent pool,” says Carol Glazer, CEO of the National Organization on Disability. “When people spend their entire lives solving problems in a world that wasn’t built for them, ... that can be translated into high productivity.”

The portion of working-age disabled Americans who are employed averaged 29.3% last year, up from 26.8% in 2013, figures from the Labor Department and Moody’s Analytics show. That’s still far lower than the 73.5% of non-disabled Americans who were working, though the latter has not increased as sharply. The jobless rate for disabled people is 8.8%, down from 16.9% in 2011, but more than double the U.S. jobless rate.

The return of many disabled workers to the labor force has helped shrink the Social Security disability rolls, which swelled during and after the recession as many people with less severe infirmities applied for benefits after their unemployment insurance expired. The past three years, the number of people on disability has steadily fallen to 8.7 million from 9 million and the ranks of those leaving has exceeded those joining, notes Moody’s economist Adam Ozimek.

Meanwhile, hundreds of companies have launched programs to recruit people with disabilities in recent years, partly in response to the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which bars discrimination against job applicants and requires “reasonable accommodations” in the workplace. Now that job candidates are scarcer, many firms are ratcheting up those efforts. With millions of employees job hopping for higher wages, companies such as CVS, Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers find people with disabilities are often more reliable and loyal. And those with conditions such as autism can be more detail-oriented. Microsoft has hired 50 people with autism the past three years, mostly as software engineers.

CVS hires hundreds of disabled people annually under an initiative it began about 20 years ago, but the company has ramped it up amid the tight labor market, with the number of recruits doubling in 2017.

“We have to get creative” to fill job openings, says David Casey, CVS’ vice president of workforce strategies. Its program “is a competitive advantage. We’re getting access to a talented pool that a lot of other companies are overlooking.”

Several years ago, the company joined with state and local agencies to open “mock pharmacies” brimming with CVS products, prescriptions and signage to train disabled job candidates.

Kaylee Merrick, 24, who lives in Stafford, Va., got her first job through the program nearly two years ago. She has anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, memory loss, attention-deficit disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. In job interviews, “I was — Oh, no, what if they don’t hire me? I start fidgeting really bad. I have tics.” At CVS, she says, “they teach you.”

Merrick rings up purchases, stocks shelves, cleans and helps customers. “I’m basically running around all day,” she says. “I love dealing with people, even the grumpy ones.”

“When people spend their entire lives solving problems in a world that wasn’t built for them, that’s an attribute that can be translated into high productivity in the workforce.”

Carol Glazer CEO of the National Organization on Disability

JACK GRUBER/USA TODAY CVS employee Kaylee Merrick, 24, suffers from ADHD and anxiety. “I love dealing with people,” says Merrick, who works up to 30 hours a week.