Ableism is an underlying structural force that maintains income inequality for certain members of the population – redistribution policy fetishizes integration and independence while masking the exploitation of disabled people

(David – professor of sociology @ University of Toronto, Michelle Maroto - professor of sociology @ University of Alberta, and Jennifer Brooks – research associate in the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability @ Cornell, “The Sociology of Disability-Based Economic Inequality,” Contemporary Sociology 54.1, 2022)

Disability is often ignored in sociological studies of inequality and stratification even though it is a highly stigmatized status characteristic strongly associated with socioeconomic marginalization, exclusion, discrimination, and disadvantage. Disability shapes experiences with economic insecurity and poverty but, historically, it has seldom been the focus (in most cases even tangentially) of sociologists studying economic inequality. Current mainstream sociological literature offers few references to disability as an axis of inequality alongside race, class, and gender (Mauldin 2020, 2022; Maroto and Pettinicchio 2022). To some extent, this deficit has created new interdisciplinary opportunities for a more focused study of disability-based economic inequality. Some of these efforts take place within disability studies, although a great deal more of this work lies at the margins of sociology, economics, health, and public policy. While these provide important insights, there is little direct dialogue between these research agendas—or with the core of their respective disciplines— contributing to a landscape of scattered silos. Rather than a cohesive social science research agenda on disability-based economic inequality, we are left with episodic bursts of scholarship, isolated, if not excluded, by what are considered ‘‘core areas’’ of inquiry, including inequality and stratification. Bringing disability into mainstream sociological work on inequality is mutually beneficial to disability studies and to the discipline of sociology. Sociology offers sophisticated empirical and theoretical tools for understanding institutional, organizational, and attitudinal bases of inequality that can fruitfully be applied to ableism, which is rooted in virtually all social arenas. One such theoretical tool is relational inequality theory (Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt 2019; Acker 2006; Tilly 1999). According to this perspective, disability is associated with low status. This helps legitimize the exploitation of disabled people by those regarded as having higher status and, as such, more resources and power. These exploitative relationships are embedded in a variety of organizations, contributing to the (re)production of inequality (Maroto and Pettinicchio 2022). Disability studies provides perspectives that, in the case of economic inequality, shed light on the material, lived experience of different disabilities visa`- vis socially constructed barriers (see Shandra 2018), contributing to a broader sociology of disablism (Thomas 2007; Shakespeare 2014). The symbiosis between disability studies and sociology provides social scientists the tools necessary to uncover underlying structural and cultural forces at work in maintaining inequality regimes (Aker 2006), as well as the ways in which those inequality regimes are challenged through policy, political mobilization, and collective action (Pettinicchio 2019; Pettinicchio and Maroto 2020). There are also important practical reasons for further developing our sociological perspective on disability-based economic inequality. For years, activists, scholars, and policy-makers have noted that employment rates among disabled Americans have been abysmal. In 2019, former President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address touted the ‘‘hottest’’ economy in years, pointing to decreasing unemployment rates not only among Blacks but also among people with disabilities. Trump’s speech implied that we should be proud that more disabled people are in the workforce.1 This language is not unique to Trump. The Clinton administration in the 1990s and, later, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton championed the growth in employment throughout that decade. However, when it comes to people with disabilities, these numbers ignore where they are situated in the labor market, while masking the growing number of discouraged workers who have simply given up looking for a job (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2021; Brooks 2019b; Pettinicchio and Maroto 2020). Disabled people in the United States and elsewhere are more likely to find themselves in lowpaying, non-unionized, precarious work (Schur and Kruse 2022), which partly explains persistent earnings inequalities, not to mention the many Americans who now count themselves among the working poor, living paycheck to paycheck with little saved. And then there is the COVID-19 pandemic. As scholars focused on social determinants of health remind us, status characteristics like race, class, gender, and disability will have an important impact in how already marginalized and vulnerable groups experience crises like pandemics. Marginalized groups will continue to be disadvantaged if efforts at recovery ignore these groups (Link and Phelan 1999). Throughout the pandemic, social distancing measures and vaccination policies and campaigns, along with economic policies, often ignored or negatively affected people with disabilities (Pettinicchio, Maroto, and Lukk 2021). Importantly, the pandemic has highlighted extant structural inequalities along with policy failures like exclusionary economic supports, barriers to care, and insensitive COVID countermeasures, preventing individuals from falling further into economic destitution. Given what we already know about labor market barriers and financial insecurity among people with disabilities, the economic effects of the pandemic on this group will be dire and long-lasting. Now more than ever, we should be turning to sociological insights about systems of disadvantage. In their application to disability, we should also expect important feedback in further refining those insights, thus making sociology’s contribution to economic inequality stronger. In this paper, we outline and describe key areas of inquiry speaking to the sociology of disability-based economic inequality. In addition to providing a synthesis of sometimes disparate literatures located throughout the social science landscape (but often with key sociological contributions), we also seek to motivate sociological inquiry into the links between rights policy and the organization of work; the relationship between institutional arrangements and norms, values, and attitudes; the intersections of statuses like gender, class, race, and disability and what these mean for inequality; and the way systems of inequality are challenged by individuals and organizations. We begin by situating disability and work within a broader social policy context. We do this because alleged ‘‘policy failures’’ motivated much writing on disability and employment throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Getting people with disabilities into the labor market has had a lengthy history intertwined with the development of the American welfare state, as in other liberal regimes. It also sheds light on the perversion of these intentions and rising conflict with the burgeoning civil rights frame in the 1970s, highlighting both structural and attitudinal barriers in challenging disability based economic inequality. We then turn to empirical aspects of social science research on disability and the labor market. We focus our review on work that seeks to make sense of socioeconomic declines in the wake of landmark disability rights and antidiscrimination legislation and then delve deeper into the structure of the labor market itself. This literature points to how occupational segregation, marginalization, and oppression in the labor market go a long way in explaining negative economic outcomes. But employment is not the only dimension of disability-based economic inequality. Poverty and financial insecurity extend beyond employment (or lack thereof)—an issue on which sociologists are well poised to speak. Throughout, we link structural and institutional dimensions to attitudinal considerations that together create barriers to financial security. In this vein, we show how the intersection of disability with gender, class, and race shape economic disadvantage, and we point to the important interplay between sociology, feminist scholarship, and disability studies in shedding light on disabilitybased economic inequality. In our conclusion, we return to the important role of sociological inquiry, both theoretical and empirical, in uncovering persistent economic disadvantage and relate this to COVID-19 and the kinds of inequality made more acute by the pandemic that should be of interest to sociologists. Welfare, Rights, and Disadvantage Many countries have enacted antidiscrimination and rights legislation meant to aid people with disabilities, policies often motivated by concerns over unemployment and economic marginalization. For decades, the United States was regarded as a world leader in establishing social welfare provisions and rights legislation aimed at people with disabilities (Pettinicchio 2019). The Republican-led senate in 2012 failed to ratify the UN Convention on Persons with Disabilities, even though the Convention ironically echoed the intentions of American policymakers when they enacted the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act decades earlier. But the road to rights is rather long, and the implications for understanding employment insecurity and economic disadvantage more generally are not straightforward. Disability social policy is imbued with certain values fetishizing work as a form of social integration and independence from the state that continue to inform how we think more generally about marginalized groups in relation to social welfare and financial security—a topic of inquiry critical to any sociologist interested in structural inequality. ‘‘Independence through Work’’ In the early twentieth century, the solution to getting Americans with disabilities out of asylums and off government benefits was to rehabilitate them into employment. An integral part of America’s early welfare state was vocational rehabilitation, which in 1920 via the Smith-Fess Act extended provisions once reserved for disabled war veterans to all Americans with disabilities. By the middle of the last century, rehabilitation was seen as an American success story. Key mechanisms, including a policy monopoly of rehabilitation professionals, legislators, government bureaucrats, and disability groups of the time—all with stakes in the game—worked to promote, reinforce, and watch over these policies and programs. Their efforts helped to secure expansion and reappropriation despite a political climate where conservatives in both parties in Congress curtailed the expansion of social policy (Pettinicchio 2013, 2017, 2019). Still, many policy-makers believed it was a moral and economic imperative that people with disabilities be employed, regardless of whether jobs were meaningful or provided enough earnings to achieve independence or match one’s actual skills and training. In 1936, the Randolph-Sheppard Act created ‘‘special’’ employment with preference to blind vendors on Federal government property. Although the law is considered an early example of affirmative action, it did not promote integration into mainstream employment. A few years later, the Javits-Wagner-O’Day Act expanded the use of sheltered workshops—supervised workplaces paying subminimum wages through contracts often from government agencies and nonprofit organizations (Whittaker 2005; Bryan 2006). Although several states have banned subminimum wages, this legacy continues today through Section 14(c) certificates that exempt employers from paying people with disabilities minimum wages mandated by the Fair Labor Standards Act (Friedman 2019).