In today’s post, Sue Olney (@olney_sue) and Alex Devine (@alexdevine_UoM) discuss issues in disability employment in the context of this week’s Jobs and Skills Summit in Australia. They argue that closing the persistent gap in employment and labour force participation between Australians with and without disability needs whole of government action, not more talk about Disability Employment Services.

For Australians with disability, access to meaningful employment matters. Without it, the health and social-economic inequities experienced by many people with disability are much harder to address (CRE-DH 2022). It’s no small matter either. There are 2.1 million Australians with disability aged between 15 and 64 years - 12 per cent of our working age population (MDI 2022 ). Fewer than 300,000 are NDIS participants. Many are keen to work, yet only half of them are in the labour market. Within that group, there are more than half a million unemployed people with disability on the caseloads of Disability Employment Services (DES) and Workforce Australia (previously jobactive) right now, while businesses are crying out for workers. And their numbers are growing.

People with disability in DES and mainstream employment services caseloads pre and post pandemic (Australian Government data sources: Labour Market Information Portal jobactive Caseload Data & DES caseload and commencement data; data.gov.au Disability Employment Services Caseload and Commencements Data; Labour Market Insights Snapshot and jobactive data) Alt text: The total number of people with disability in DES and jobactive increased from 450,351 to 547,778 between December 2019 and March 2022

We should be asking hard questions about why this is happening. Australia’s economic and public health outlook calls for new approaches to ‘jobs and skills’ across the board, to fully realise the potential of our population.

We hope that attention paid to disability employment in the lead up to this week’s Jobs and Skills Summit, and recent hype surrounding ‘kicking out poor performing providers’ from the DES market, has some impact on those figures. It’s hard to be hopeful, however, when both the labour force participation rate and the employment rate of Australians with disability have lagged behind the rates for Australians without disability by more than 30 per cent for a generation. And the gap has widened through three decades of economic growth, skill shortages, government inquiries, reforms to education, employment, and disability legislation and policy, changes to welfare conditionality, technological and medical advances, changes in the nature of work, and a shift to a more service-oriented economy – all of which should have narrowed it.

*Labour force participation of Australians with disability aged 15-64 1993-2018 (ABS 2003, 2012a, 2015, 2020) Alt text: labour force participation rate 1993 55 per cent, 2018 53.4 per cent*

*Comparison of labour force participation and employment of Australians aged 15-64 years with and without disability in 2018 (ABS 2020) Alt text: gap of more than 30 per cent in both cases*

It’s too easy for governments to blame a handful of underperforming DES providers for failing to move people with disability into work, rather than tackle the broader structural and systemic issues that most people with disability identify as the real barriers to finding and maintaining work (Devine et al 2021; Olney et al 2022). Barriers such as a lack of affordable, accessible and secure housing in areas where there are jobs; inaccessible public transport; unmet need for health, mental health and disability related services; poverty; the complexity of navigating the NDIS; broken pathways to work; discrimination in education and training, the job market and in workplaces; a shortage of jobs that meet their diverse needs, capabilities and aspirations; and practical challenges faced by people with disability who are only able to work part time or occasionally, in relation to moving in and out of income support and maintaining access to concessions to cover extra costs of living that people without disabilities do not incur.

These issues undermine the effectiveness of even the best performing employment services providers. For DES providers seeking work for job seekers with complex needs, insufficient resources and attention within and external to DES to address these structural issues makes it virtually impossible.

Yet, governments keep tinkering around the edges, deflecting blame and shifting costs across jurisdictions. Both research and experience suggest that proposed changes to DES (Department of Social Services 2022) and recent changes to mainstream employment services (Department of Employment and Workplace Relations 2022) will not increase employment of people with disability at scale. As COVID-19 continues to disrupt and reshape the labour market, high demand for labour is benefitting some jobseekers with disability. But the pandemic has compounded pre-existing labour market disadvantages for many people with disability, including young people whose education and/or transition from education to work has been disrupted; people whose disability has been exacerbated by lockdowns and changed routines; people with disability and chronic health conditions who remain isolated to reduce risk of adverse outcomes from infection; people who are only able to work sporadically; and people who contract the virus with lasting debilitating effects.

Jobactive caseload data for the twelve months between June 2021 and June 2022 shows that high demand for labour did not benefit people with disability in the job market proportionately. Blunt instruments applied by governments to address short-term skill shortages in this environment could further sideline people with disability in the labour force.

Shift in the jobactive caseload for people with disability June 2021 and June 2022 (Labour Market Information Portal jobactive Caseload Data & DES caseload and commencement data; Labour Market Insights Snapshot and jobactive data) Alt text: jobactive caseload fell 23 percent, people with disability in the caseload fell 7 per cent

We hope against hope that this week’s Jobs and Skills summit seizes the opportunity presented by the pandemic, which has upended traditional ways of working, to reset how persistent policy problems like unemployment and underemployment are framed and addressed, how work is organised, how productivity is measured, how people are trained for work, and business hiring and management practices. We need a more inclusive and diverse labour force for all Australians to thrive.

References

ABS (2003) 4430.0 - Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia: Summary of Findings 2003, Australian Bureau of Statistics Canberra

ABS (2012a) 4430.0 - Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia: Summary of Findings 2012, Australian Bureau of Statistics Canberra

ABS (2012b) 4433.0.55.006 - Disability and Labour Force Participation, Australian Bureau of Statistics Canberra

ABS (2015) 4430.0 - Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia: Summary of Findings 2015, Australian Bureau of Statistics Canberra

ABS (2018) 4430.0 - Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia: Summary of Findings 2018, Australian Bureau of Statistics Canberra

ABS (2020) 6202.0 - Labour Force, Australia, September 2020, Australian Bureau of Statistics Canberra

Australian Government data sources: Labour Market Information Portal jobactive Caseload Data & DES caseload and commencement data; data.gov.au Disability Employment Services Caseload and Commencements Data; Labour Market Insights Snapshot and jobactive data

Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health (2022). Disability and Wellbeing Monitoring Framework: Baseline indicator data for Australians aged 18-64 years. Melbourne:
Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health. https://doi.org/10.25910/ffxs-wd42 https://credh.org.au/projects/monitoring-inequalities/monitoring-inequalities-baseline-data-report/

Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (2022) Workforce Australia https://www.dese.gov.au/workforce-australia

Department of Social Services (2022) Inclusive. Accessible. Diverse. Consultation Report – Shaping your new disability employment support program. Australian Government, Canberra https://engage.dss.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/New-Disability-Employment-Support-Model-Consultation-Report.pdf

Devine A., Shields M., Dimov S., Dickinson H., Vaughan C., Bentley R, LaMontagne A., Kavanagh A. 2021. Australia’s Disability Employment Services program: participant perspectives on factors influencing access to work. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 18(21): 11485 doi: 10.3390/ijerph182111485

Olney S., Devine A., Karanikolas A., Dimov S., Malbon J., Katsikis G. 2021. Disability and work in a health and economic crisis: mitigating the risk of long-term labour market exclusion for Australians with disability in the wake of COVID-19. Australian Journal of Public Administration. 18(21): 11485 doi.org/10.1111/1

Olney S, Mills, A & Fallon L (2022) The Tier 2 tipping point: access to support for working-age Australians with disability without individual NDIS funding. Melbourne Disability Institute, University of Melbourne https://disability.unimelb.edu.au/home/projects/support-outside-ndis

Looking for workers in the lead up to the Jobs and Skills Summit? Here’s half a million.