More disabled Americans are employed, thanks to remote work

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Pretty much me at this point. I&#x27;ve had the same remote job for 9 years, and while I could work an office job at the time I was hired (I was 31 then), now at 40 and with a number of my chronic conditions rather a bit less background than they used to be. Not to mention that pretty much everything I have is either respitory, or one of the major comorbidities for COVID, which is still very much in circulation.<p>To give one example... about 2 years ago I had to spend about 10 months on near-total bed rest to get a healing-resistant foot ulcer to finally heal. I was able to work from bed for almost all of that. If I&#x27;d been working an office job it basically would have been a choice - keep my job, or keep my foot.

Something for those who are disabled and collect Social Security Disability (aka green check) or Social Security Income (gold check) and is pretty much mostly young and pre-retirement-age disabled folks: if your income goes over half of what you take in from Social Security, your eligibility will be &quot;threaten&quot; and re-evaluation WILL occur, often with reducing benefits until you earn twice what SSA gives you.<p>So, if the job doesn&#x27;t pan out, you are going to be in a rather severe financial bind for quite a awhile until those re-applied benefit(s) restarts for you.<p>Hence, many disabled are looking for work that do not pay more than $800-1200&#x2F;month (USD) ... just to avoid their re-evaluation trigger.

One way to look at this is that some conditions are less of a disability than they used to be. In the same way that medical advances can make some diseases curable or inconsequential so social changes can also make a disease irrelevant.<p>This is an important lesson, as it should alert us that there likely are other ways our society operates that make a disease into an impediment that could be changed. If you want to know what they are, go talk to disabled rights advocates!

That&#x27;s very good. All the DEI brochures I have seen portrayed young good looking people of different colors. I hope we will get more diversity and inclusion for disabled people.

Surprise, surprise making it easier to work allows more people to work. Taking a phrases I read about the latest iPad. If they stop neutering the workplace by not allowing remote work then more people will work. Sort of like how cities are neutered because they are car centric and not people centric. And it’s not just the currently disabled but caregivers as well. I had a PM that was caring for aging parents and we could hear her feeding them as we were on calls trying to unbork a business process that wouldn’t let us give customers the software licenses they paid for.<p>This is a good thing but there are some people who hate the idea of remote work because they can’t comprehend a management style that isn’t their First Grade teacher’s.

It&#x27;s only inertia that makes &#x27;remote&#x27; not default in this technological age.<p>Of course some prefer the office (some of whom from their own inertia), some jobs genuinely need to be or benefit from being done in a shared office space, but for the absolute vast majority of roles the office was always about needing to pass paper documents around, or needing expensive and fixed equipment that is a telephone line or computer.

I&#x27;m one of them. Even when still in the hospital and rehab center -- Lost my lower leg to necrotizing fasciitis and sepsis -- I was able to keep working. (And I wanted to do something.) I thought I&#x27;d be going back to the office at some point; but, my supervisor and EEO office decided I&#x27;d work from home. when I got home from the hospital and rehab, there was a letter authorizing full-time telework.<p>I keep arguing I don&#x27;t need to take our annual Workplace Violence Prevention training; but, I have to go online and take it every year. (I just took it a week ago.)

I’ve always liked that being disabled in America isn’t necessarily the death sentence it is in other countries that have no accommodation for disabled people.

Remote work is very inclusive.

The internet is generally a huge boon for many people with disabilities.<p>If you write code, blog, etc. please do what you can to be compliant with online accommodation. A handicapped person who can use your widget -- say, a blind person -- will be thrilled and loyal. If they can&#x27;t and are forced to try to go somewhere in person or something because the online option doesn&#x27;t work, this may be a huge hardship and may outright cut them out of being able to do certain things at all.

I really wonder if some organization like the ACLU could bring cases against &quot;Return to Work&quot; initiatives as being discriminatory?

Not really related to the article but I always tell myself that one of these days, I will dedicate more time working on something that improves the lives of a certain group of people with disabilities. The trigger was a single simple sentence that I read a year or two ago: “Everybody is just temporarily abled.”

Happy to see this. The push to RTO seems to just be a front for legal constructive dismissal of expensive employees. These jobs are immediately being backfilled by remote employees on the otherside of the world. The FTE to third-party ratio is growing exponentially, it&#x27;s becoming way more common to see things like a 1:5+ fte to 3p ratio.

it makes me wonder if we should, in stead of retire have a second round of organized education around 45-55 to prepare for a job that doesn&#x27;t involve physical acrobatics that one can do from home. With laws to accommodate the process. You could for example tap into the pension for the duration of the training.

This is great news. Allowing people access to high-quality jobs they were previously shut out of is objectively awesome.<p>I’m bored by the comment flamewars here every time this topic comes up, though. I get it, some people love remote work and some people don’t. Another expression of the wonderful diversity of humanity. I just did a job search and I’m happy to report that there are still many options for either in-office or fully remote teams. Pick one that suits you and stop getting your blood pressure up over this, seriously.

I&#x27;m one of them. I&#x27;m pretty terrified that the gears of capitalism will eventually lead to remote work being outlawed.

Civically we allegedly care about these topics, and note their solutions via remote work<p>- disabled accommodations: this article, and anecdotes from people we know in this situation<p>- finding some method for a dramatic enough state change in environmental conditions as to back up from disconcerting climate change barriers we’re pushing into: I can’t recall the specifics but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere plummets<p>- preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work: can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom&#x2F;slack environment vs in office.<p>- accommodating parents and their child raising needs with policies that don’t come out of 1950: every working parent I know with remote jobs experience significant flexibility here.<p>- affordable housing space: office space conversions are starting.<p>The longer the debate goes on about hybrid&#x2F;wfh and the above tangible proven benefits vs RTO for “The Collaboration” and “My Socialization Needs,” the more I speculate our society doesn’t actually care about the above topics, at all.<p>Or, if we do care, this should be called out over and over and over. Bc it’s not getting discussed this way.

Employers systemically illegally discriminated against employees by falsely alleging that accommodating them with work from home was an undue hardship, and would just point at other employers not doing it to demonstrate this.<p>COVID forced WFH for business reasons and thus employers are no longer as easily able to illegally discriminate against their disabled employees since it&#x27;s patently obvious that the accommodation is possible and it doesn&#x27;t present some existential threat to a business to provide it. It&#x27;s also that employers are simply more geared up to allow work from home and it&#x27;s less of an actual burden in time and money.

That is really freaking cool. Creating a platform that&#x27;s location independent really helps people with disabilities.<p>I do think LLMs by enabling people to work indepedently (in adiditon to remote) should add degrees of freedom that would help people with disabilties.<p>LLMs should enable this by easing creation of work contracts (ie allow more accomodations by changing contracts), automation of most of most business operations, ability to quickly get to &quot;average level&quot; on a lot of business concepts, automation of finances (eg: using Runway).<p>Hopefully the creative piece of building a business will no longer get drowned out by the operational pieces.