Tighter labor market has positive impact on disabled workers

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The economy’s tightened labor market, which has handed transferred power back to American workers from businesses, has been a benefit to disabled Americans who, as Reuters reports, are winning their dream jobs:

Megan Helsel, a kayaking wildlife specialist, has her dream job, and T’angelo Magee is making headway toward his, a commercial pilot. Both say work is central to their identity. Both are disabled.

Americans with disabilities, physical and cognitive, in recent months have been joining the workforce at a faster pace than those without disabilities, according to data collected by organizations that work with the disabled.

Workforce data collected by the Kessler Foundation and the University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability, and published by Reuters, reveals that disabled Americans have been reintegrating into the workforce at increased rates over the last two years after being hit hard by 2008’s Great Recession.

For example, the labor force participating rate for working-age disabled Americans increased 6.5 percent in July compared to a year before. This is far above the 0.3 percent increase that working-age Americans without a disability enjoyed in their labor force participation rate year-t0-year.

The Trump administration has sought to decrease the enormous foreign competition that working-age Americans have been subjected to for decades through the country’s mass illegal and legal immigration policy. The Washington, D.C.-imposed policy brings millions of foreign workers, often willing to work for minimum wage or less, to the U.S. against whom America’s working and middle class are forced to compete for jobs.