For years, people with disabilities have advocated for remote work as a reasonable accommodation to address commuting barriers, home medical needs, environmental sensitivities, fatigue, and other employment barriers. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has ruled that telework may be a form of reasonable accommodation under the ADA. However, employers have often denied telework accommodation requests, claiming that physical presence in the workplace is an essential part of the job.

This article examines the extent to which employees worked from home because of the pandemic, focusing on differentials between people with and without disabilities with implications for cancer survivors. We use data on COVID-19 from the Current Population Survey over the May 2020 to June 2021 period. We present descriptive statistics and the results from regression and decomposition analysis. We found that while workers with disabilities were more likely than those without disabilities to be teleworking before the pandemic, they were less likely to be teleworking as a result of the pandemic. Differences in the occupational distribution account for most of this difference. People with disabilities experienced relatively more pandemic-related hardships as well, compared to people without disabilities, including a greater chance of not being able to work due to their employer losing business and more difficulty in accessing medical care.