Status: 11/30/2021 9:19 a.m.
Even in the second Corona year, people with disabilities suffer more from the tense labor market than the rest of the population. This is shown by the inclusion barometer presented by “Aktion Mensch”.
More people with disabilities were unemployed in 2021 to date than in the previous year. This is the result of a current study by “Aktion Mensch”. The effects of the Corona crisis are more of a burden than the average for Germans, according to the aid organization.
Only slight improvement in sight
The study, which Aktion Mensch commissioned from the Handelsblatt Research Institute, shows that the pandemic makes inclusion – i.e. the participation and integration of disabled people – more difficult in the labor market. On average in the first ten months of the current year, more people with disabilities were unemployed than in the previous year, namely 174,006.
The situation has improved slightly since the beginning of the year; in January the number was around 180,000. But people with disabilities felt little of improvement in the general labor market, the report said.
Inclusion as of 2016
The number of unemployed people with disabilities nationwide was more than eight percent above the pre-crisis level. “In 2020, the first of the pandemic, inclusion on the labor market suffered a massive setback. The number of unemployed people with disabilities rose to the highest level since 2016,” said Christina Marx, spokeswoman for Aktion Mensch. This situation has hardly changed to date.
The study sees a lack of qualification and employment measures due to the corona restrictions as the main reason for the higher unemployment. Fewer people were able to qualify for a new job than in the pre-Corona period. Only four percent of the corona-related increase can be attributed to layoffs.
Long-term unemployed with disabilities are “forgotten”
Long-term unemployed people with disabilities, in particular, are being forgotten by the labor market more than before, according to Marx. For them, “without active support from business and politics, there would be little chance of gaining a foothold in the primary labor market,” said Marx.
The president of the Handelsblatt Research Institute, the former economist Bert Rürup, sees only a gradual improvement for the near future. “People with disabilities will benefit from the foreseeable recovery in the labor market, but are likely to benefit more slowly than people without disabilities.”
The situation is developing differently from region to region. According to the study, the federal states of Hamburg recorded the highest increase in the number of unemployed among people with disabilities with an increase of almost 16 percent compared to October 2019 and Bavaria with an increase of around 14 percent in the same period.