inclusion
The labor market remains tight for people with disabilities
In the first year of the pandemic, inclusion in the labor market suffered a massive setback. Photo: Carsten Koall / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
The Corona crisis has caused the number of unemployed people with disabilities to skyrocket. There is no rapid improvement in sight.
The situation on the labor market remains tense for people with disabilities in the second year of the corona pandemic.
In the first ten months of this year, an average of 174,000 people with disabilities were unemployed – and thus even more than in the same period of the previous year, as reported by Aktion Mensch and the Handelsblatt Research Institute in their work inclusion barometer. 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 in the labor market suffered a massive setback. The number of unemployed people with disabilities rose in a very short time to the highest level since 2016 ”, said the head of the education of Aktion Mensch, Christina Marx. This situation has hardly changed to date.
It is true that people with disabilities also benefited somewhat from the recovery in the labor market in the course of this year: the number of those registered as unemployed fell from 180,000 in January to just under 166,500 in October. This means that the labor market for people with disabilities has developed less positively than that for people without disabilities.
More unemployed than in the pre-crisis year
In total, almost 13,000 more people were registered as unemployed in October than in October of the pre-crisis year 2019. Once unemployed, people with disabilities would find it more difficult to return to the labor market than those without disabilities, according to the study.
The President of the Handelsblatt Research Institute, Bert Rürup, only forecast a gradual improvement for the near future. “People with disabilities will benefit from the foreseeable recovery in the labor market, but they will probably benefit more slowly than people without disabilities.”
DGB board member Anja Piel said the corona pandemic had “catastrophic consequences for working people with severe disabilities”. The future federal government must act quickly so that people with disabilities are no longer left behind in the labor market.
The trade unionist called for “a special short-term labor market program with the aim of limiting the negative corona effects for severely disabled people”. In the future, companies would have to dig deeper into their pockets for the equalization levy if they did not employ a single severely disabled person, she demanded.
Elisabeth Schulte, managing director of the employers’ association of social services and education, which counts many facilities for disabled people among its members, emphasized that around half of the severely disabled people registered as unemployed have completed vocational training or an academic education – significantly more than the unemployed without severe disabilities.