The liberal welfare regime is designed so the aff’s benefits will trade off with meaningful employment, locking people with disabilities in a poverty trap

(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)

For many people with disabilities, most of their income does not come from employment. Because people with disabilities are unable to find and maintain well-paying secure jobs because of labor market discrimination and other structural barriers, they rely on government supports, family, and savings to attain some level of financial security. Compared to other groups, racial minority women with disabilities with less than a high school degree are more likely to rely on income sources outside of employment (Maroto et al. 2019). Studying disability, the labor market, and socioeconomic policies reveals how important employment is in staving off economic insecurity, and it also highlights the complex tension between unemployment and income from sources other than work, especially government benefits. This tension points to pervasive underlying attitudes about who is and who is not deserving of government support, couched in the belief that people on benefits do not want to work—which has been challenged by numerous studies showing otherwise (e.g., Livermore 2011; Ali, Schur, and Blanck 2011). This research also brings to light perspectives on the role of rights legislation and income supports when it comes to labor market outcomes and economic security more generally— namely, lumping important anti-inequality and antidiscrimination legislation in with extant systems of disability-related government benefits. During talks surrounding the enactment of the ADA, some policy stakeholders, especially businesses and their interest groups, already viewed the law through the lens of redistribution—taking resources from some and giving these as benefits to others—rather than as a mechanism to even an unequal playing field (Pettinicchio 2019). About a decade after the ADA took effect, Acemoglu and Angrist’s (2001) pivotal study created a framework and sets of assumptions for subsequent social science research into the idea that laws like the ADA coupled with government benefits served to disincentivize employers from hiring disabled people and potential employees with disabilities from being in the labor market. Their findings have been challenged by subsequent work (see Kruse and Schur 2002; Maroto and Pettinicchio 2014b). Empirical inconsistencies also abound when it comes to the purported effects of government benefits and supports on employment. For example, although Maroto and Pettinicchio (2014b) find that people living in states with ADA-like laws saw better employment outcomes, they did find a negative relationship between Social Security Disability Insurance and employment. More recently, Sevak et al.’s (2018) analysis of ACS data suggests that even though living in a U.S. state where Supplementary Security Income is more than 100 dollars higher than the national average is associated with a very small likelihood of being unemployed, it also only represented about 2 percent of the overall 37 percent disability employment rate. Medicaid Buy-In programs, rehabilitation outcomes, and federal expenditures were not significantly related to employment outcomes among people with disabilities. Much of the explanatory power in their analysis came from individual-level characteristics including race, gender, and education, among others. Inconsistencies are no doubt a function of the data used, analyses employed, measures of disability (Pettinicchio and Maroto 2021), and the nature of the benefits being considered. But they are also a function of underlying assumptions about the benefits-employment relationship, whose, as Acemoglu and Angrist (2001) themselves admit, ‘‘net theorized effects are ambiguous.’’ What is lacking is stronger, more formal sociological insight on how systems of benefits built into liberal welfare regimes have adverse and opposite effects on labor market participation and economic wellbeing among people with disabilities (Parish, Rose, and Andrews 2009; She and Livermore 2007). Benefit programs may provide access to vital disability-related supports, such as wheelchairs, hospital visits, medications, and attendant care, which many private insurers do not offer, while also providing cash transfers in small amounts, driving individuals into a ‘‘poverty trap’’ in order to receive lifesustaining supports and services (Stapleton et al. 2006). Low-income thresholds tied to employment-based income supports may also keep people in lower-paying jobs because a higher-paying job would throw someone off benefits (Pettinicchio and Maroto 2020; Kaye 2009). This means they would potentially earn less in a better-paying jobwith no income supports than they would from having a lower-paying job with income supports. It also raises the importance of examining broader structural economic inequalities that extend beyond work. Inherently sociological, such analyses must consider the broader social, economic, cultural, and institutional contexts that contribute to longterm economic marginalization. Disability, a community among others with a long and often problematic relationship with the development of liberal welfare regimes, has been especially affected by neoliberal shifts in social policy over the last forty years. Eroding social safety nets and a shift toward ‘‘personal responsibility’’ (Hacker 2006; McCloud and Dwyer 2011; Sherry 2014) have placed an economically vulnerable group in an even more precarious position where they are less able to weather financial hardships. These political and institutional shifts are playing out in many countries. In Canada, for example, people from historically disadvantaged groups experience significant barriers in accessing financial products, including credit to help build assets (Campbell and Kaufman 2006; Conley 1999; Shamsuddin and DeVoretz 1998; Zhang 2003). Maroto and Pettinicchio (2020) analyzed data from the Canadian Survey of Financial Security, a recurring survey that draws from tax filings to ascertain net worth, debt, and assets, finding that households that include members with disabilities have far fewer non-home assets. The negative relationship between disability and wealth was strengthened when including the already negative effects of employment, given low employment rates and earnings among people with disabilities. Sociological analyses can provide important insights into how inequalities and disadvantages in multiple areas of life compound and accumulate. Economic disadvantage is not only tied to labor markets, but is also linked to accessing credit markets, building assets, and interacting with often complex, disjointed, and, in some cases, perverse systems of government supports and benefits that perpetuate inequality and economic marginalization. This also includes pre-labor market disadvantage, inequality, and discrimination, including in education, which has important implications for cumulative economic disadvantage (Shuey and Jovic 2013; Shuey and Willson 2022; U.S. Department of Labor 2014).