While mental health and wellbeing in the workplace is now clearly becoming a priority for employers, the level of resources and tools needed have not been easily found nor available. Every year, NOD fields more and more questions from employers wondering what they can do to specifically help address mental health and wellbeing for their employees. Clearly, industry is struggling to find solutions to this growing workplace crisis. That is why NOD teamed up with Rutgers University in 2023 to write this brief about efforts by one large professional services firm, Ernst & Young LLP (EY US), to change the landscape of wellbeing within its workplace culture. It examines relevant academic research and frames the firm’s efforts within research-identified effective practices and challenges.

Many people with disabilities benefit from working at home, and the pandemic has increased employer acceptance of telework, but the current occupational distribution limits this potential. Tighter labor markets during the recovery offer hope that employers will increasingly hire people with disabilities in both telework and non-telework jobs.

People with disabilities continue to face extreme disparities in economic inclusion. They have lower employment rates, earn significantly less, are more likely to engage in precarious work, report barriers to receiving workplace accommodations, avoid disclosure of invisible and stigmatized identities, and are more likely to report discrimination than their non-marginalized counterparts. These challenges are heightened by and interrelated with other inequalities that marginalized populations experience such as higher rates of poverty and lack of access to education, housing, transportation, medical care, banking, and food. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the employment disparities between people with and without disabilities and within the non-monolithic disability community. Many people with disabilities experienced job losses, lower earnings, and challenges getting access to adequate social support. This chapter discusses barriers to economic inclusion of people with disabilities. In particular, it focuses on employment and financial inclusion as two key markers of larger economic empowerment. In helping to illuminate the many complex issues faced in the employment of persons with disabilities, this chapter aims to identify new and promising means to address barriers faced by people with disabilities. With increased partnership and collaboration, with the disability community leading this effort, the public and private sectors must seek to address the employment of persons with disabilities, which affects millions in the United States and around the world.

As the COVID-19 recession began in Q2 2020, people with disabilities experienced employment losses that were proportionately similar to those experienced by people without disabilities. However, during the subsequent economic recovery, the employment rate of people with disabilities has grown more quickly in Q4 2021 through Q2 2022, driven by increased labor force participation.

In this paper, we draw on prior research and recent federal statistics to discuss the unfolding effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the SSDI program and its beneficiaries.

This special section of the Journal of Cancer Survivorship examines disability-inclusive employment policy and practice, cancer survivorship, and the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") of 1990. It considers current issues in research, policy, practice, and law in the United States, including new questions arising in light of COVID-19, such as the nature of disability disclosure, workplace accommodations and remote work, emerging workplace health surveillance technologies, and inclusive employment practices for cancer survivors. It also presents, for comparative purposes, a current analysis of cancer-related disability discrimination in the media in the United States and Israel.

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.

We examine the effect of cyclical job displacement during the Great Recession on the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program. Exploiting variation in the severity and timing of the recession across states, we estimate the effect of unemployment on SSDI applications and awards. Our estimates imply the Great Recession increased claims processing costs by $2.960 billion during 2008-2012, and SSDI benefit obligations by $55.730 billion in present value, or $97.365 billion including both SSDI and Medicare benefits.

This article is part of an ongoing body of investigation examining the experiences of lawyers with diverse and multiple minority identities, with particular focus on lawyers with disabilities; lawyers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (“LGBTQ+” as an overarching term); and lawyers with minority identities associated with race and ethnicity, gender, and age. The focus of this article is on discrimination and bias in their workplaces as reported by the lawyers experiencing it.

Blanck discusses his thirty-year journey with the ADA. Blanck emphasizes, his journey "is intertwined, as it is for many, with personal and professional experiences. One foundational aspect of this journey has been how law students like you here today, and practicing lawyers with disabilities, have inspired me as they have sought to vindicate their ADA rights. Many of the cases in which I have acted as an expert on the ADA, or as co-counsel, were piloted by leading lawyers, many of whom happened to have disabilities. Some of them are no longer with us today.