February 28, 2023

Nearly half of the people receiving federal disability benefits have a psychiatric impairment that interferes with working. And they tend to be younger and more willing to work than other disability beneficiaries.

This makes them good candidates for employment support programs that encourage working at least part-time and might even prevent them from applying for benefits at all.

According to a Mathematica review of research on three government jobs programs, the programs had some success in boosting participants’ employment and earnings. However, they didn’t prove effective over the long term in reducing their reliance on federal disability benefits.

One federal program in Texas was geared to people with disabilities who had not applied for benefits when they entered the program. The program offered services like help with job searches, case management, and access to medical care. A year after finishing the Texas program, the number of participants receiving benefits fell 27 percent in a comparison with people who hadn’t participated. But by the sixth year, that positive impact had largely waned.

While disability recipients with mental health impairments often want to work, about half of the people in a second study said they had felt discouraged by past jobs. They cited barriers to remaining employed – on top of their mental health challenges – such as perceptions by others that they weren’t capable, a lack of transportation, and a fear of losing their benefits if they get a job. Social Security suspends disability benefits when workers earn over a maximum amount, which is $1,470 per month in 2023.

But the researchers see the feelings of discouragement as “a window of opportunity” to prevent failed work attempts through job interventions or by educating beneficiaries about Social Security’s benefit rules. …Learn More

Research

January 6, 2022

Opioids fueled a record of nearly 100,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States last year.

The biggest cause of overdose deaths was dangerous synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl. But the epidemic involving illegal chemicals grew out of the abuse of highly addictive prescription opioids. A spate of new research reveals that the use and abuse of these prescription drugs have plagued people with disabilities, who often start taking them to treat painful musculoskeletal conditions such as arthritis or a bad back.

A 2017 analysis featured in this blog provided the first estimate of opioid use among people who have disabilities that limit their ability to work. The researchers found that about one in four people applying for federal disability benefits used the medications – a much higher rate than in the U.S. population overall.

Painkillers often do more harm than good because they can increase society’s dependence on disability benefits by impairing lung function, aggravating existing conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, or causing addiction. According to 2021 research by RAND that followed older workers over several years, the opioid users in the study were much more likely to wind up on disability than their counterparts who did not take them.

“Although the pain relief is an important health goal,” the researchers concluded, “the consequences to workers and social programs of powerful prescription painkillers are substantial and long-lasting.”

The isolation and stresses caused by the pandemic are believed to have fueled the dramatic rise in overdose deaths last year. But a long-running cause, prior to COVID, was the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment. Research reported in this blog directly tied the movement of robots onto factory floors to the rise in deaths of despair – from drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide – among men between ages 30 and 54. The study found that automation accounts for nearly one in five overdose deaths in manufacturing counties, which are concentrated in the heavily industrialized Midwest. The researchers said the rate of applications for disability benefits is also higher in these counties.

Opioid abuse in the disability community is happening for the same reason it is pervasive in society: an ample supply of the addictive drugs. …Learn More

December 21, 2021

Three months into the pandemic, a few million older workers had been laid off or quit. But what happened next?

The rapid drop in employment due to COVID gave the Center for Retirement Research an unusual opportunity to study the labor force decisions of baby boomers, who are within striking distance of retirement age but may or may not be ready to take the leap.

Traditionally, older workers who left a job tended to retire. But there was little indication that the people who stopped working during the pandemic saw retirement as their best fallback option.

This conclusion by the researchers is consistent with the pre-COVID trend of boomers working longer to put themselves in a better financial position when they eventually do retire. In fact, many older workers have returned to the labor force as the economy has rebounded and vaccines have become widely available.

But in April 2020, job departures spiked before settling back down at a new, much higher level. The annual pace of departures increased from 15 percent of workers 55 and over in 2019, prior to COVID, to 23 percent in 2020.

The researchers found a surprise when they looked at who stopped working. Although older people are vulnerable to becoming seriously ill from COVID, age wasn’t a big factor in their decisions. Boomers in their 60s were no more likely to leave their jobs than people in their mid- to late-50s, according to the analysis of monthly Census Bureau surveys.

The groups most likely to leave the labor force were women, Asian-Americans, and workers who either don’t have a college degree or don’t have a job that easily lends itself to working remotely.

But among all of the age 55-plus workers in the study, the share reporting that they had retired barely increased, from an average of 12 percent prior to COVID to 13 percent last year.

The only people who left their jobs and retired in significant numbers during the pandemic were over 70. This finding reinforced what the researchers found in data from the U.S. Social Security Administration: the pandemic didn’t have a major impact on retirement because the share of workers between 62 and 70 who signed up for Social Security was relatively flat between April 2019 and June 2021. …Learn More

Behavior

December 14, 2021

COVID has worn Americans down emotionally. But it might be eating away at their financial reserves too – at least for some people.

As the pandemic has dragged on, many people said in newly released surveys that they are more anxious about their finances and feel that their savings are wearing thin.

We won’t get a true picture of the pandemic’s impact until it is far away in the rear-view mirror. For one thing, Congress’ intent when it doled out historic amounts of cash assistance to workers was to carry them through the COVID lockdowns and resulting unemployment. And it worked.

After federal relief checks were deposited into bank accounts, the saving rate shot up to about 34 percent in April 2020 and to almost 27 percent in March 2021 – the highest levels this country has seen in decades. The rate has floated down to single digits as people have spent the extra money but remains relatively high.

Recent job gains and wage increases should also bolster balance sheets. Businesses added 626,000 more jobs in June through September than the U.S. Department of Labor had originally estimated, and October was a blockbuster month, with 531,000 new jobs created. In the November jobs report, unemployment hit a pre-pandemic low of 4.2 percent.

But these signs of progress are mixed in with feelings of unease. One thing is clear from surveys of workers by T. Rowe Price, said Joshua Dietch, vice president: The challenges that existed before COVID “didn’t get any lighter as a result of the pandemic.”

NPR also fielded a financial survey in August and September of this year. More than a third of U.S. households said they are having “serious financial problems.” And the workers who have suffered the most during the economic downturn last year – people of color – are in the worst shape: more than half of Black, Hispanic, and Native American households said their financial problems were serious.

A deterioration in savings could be behind that feeling of financial insecurity. Nearly 40 percent of households in NPR’s survey with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health said they have no “savings to fall back on” – that is double the share who reported having no savings prior to COVID. The share of Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans who lack savings also doubled, though to much higher levels of 63 percent, 56 percent, and 55 percent, respectively. …Learn More

Research

June 3, 2021

The rise in opioid addiction has created an epidemic of drug overdose deaths in the United States. But what increases the risk that people develop the disorder in the first place?

Automation of the U.S. economy turns out to be a contributing factor, as workers lose good jobs to industrial robots and despair about being disengaged from the labor force, conclude researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale in a study funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration.

Manufacturing jobs, often in unionized industries, used to be a major route to the middle class. But millions of factory jobs disappeared as U.S. companies moved operations overseas. Compounding the job losses, corporate employers began installing robots in their remaining domestic operations. Automation was blamed in one study for eliminating more than 700,000 jobs and causing wage stagnation in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Prior research has connected the flight of manufacturing to increasing deaths from drug overdoses. Now, the new study specifically ties technology – measured as an increase in robots per 1,000 workers – to the increase in overdose deaths.

The men who are most affected by the rise of automation are in their prime working years, and they are concentrated in more industrialized areas. Automation accounted for nearly one in five of their overdose deaths in manufacturing counties. For women, automation was responsible for one in 10 overdose deaths in manufacturing counties. …Learn More

May 18, 2021

An unfortunate misperception about people on federal disability is that they’re not interested in working. In fact, nearly half of them want to work or expect to go back to work, and that share has been rising.

But getting or keeping a job has proved difficult, and the employment rate is very low for people who get Social Security disability benefits – or cash assistance from a companion program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Yet the vast majority of beneficiaries have past work experience that should help them in the job market.

Researchers at Mathematica mined a survey of people on disability for clues about how to help them find a job or promotion or learn a new skill.

Many of these work-oriented individuals are under extreme financial pressures and are also younger and healthier, despite their disabilities, than the people on disability who didn’t express a desire to work.

Yet only a third of the 2.6 million beneficiaries in the new study who say they want to work are either working now, were recently employed, or are looking for a job.

So, if they are willing to work and feel able to work, why are so few of them in the labor force?

The researchers landed on two big reasons. First, the work-oriented individuals, despite their desire to work, said they can’t find a job. This is a common experience because employers are either reluctant to hire people with disabilities or the available jobs don’t accommodate them. Others are hesitant to try the job market again because they feel discouraged by past employment experiences.

Second, the majority of work-oriented beneficiaries are unaware of federal programs designed to support a return to work or connect them with employers. …Learn More

October 13, 2020

The COVID-19 recession demonstrates an axiom of economics. Black unemployment always exceeds the rate for whites, the spikes are higher in recessions, and, in a recovery, employment recovers more slowly.

A record number of Black Americans were employed in 2019. But when the economy seized up in the spring, their unemployment rate soared to 17 percent, before floating down to a still-high 12.1 percent in September.  Meanwhile, the white unemployment rate dropped in half, to 7 percent.

The much higher peaks in the unemployment rate for Blacks than whites and the slower recovery are baked into the economy.

This phenomenon occurred during the “jobless recovery” from the 2001 downturn. When the economy had finally restored all of the jobs lost in that recession, the Black jobless rate remained stubbornly higher.

And after the 2008-2009 recession, as the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center accurately predicted at the time, Black unemployment hovered at “catastrophic levels” longer than the white rate did.  This disparity is now the issue in the COVID-19 recession.

Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, a Boston College economist who writes a blog about inequality, gives three interrelated reasons for Black workers’ higher unemployment rates.

First, “The U.S. still has a tremendous amount of education inequality, and the unemployment rate is always higher for people with less education,” he wrote in an email. Despite the big strides by Black men and women to obtain college degrees, roughly 30 percent have degrees, compared with more than 40 percent of whites, he said.

Second, Black workers without degrees are vulnerable because they are more likely to earn an hourly wage. An hourly paycheck means that a company can cut costs by simply reducing or eliminating a worker’s hours. “It’s much easier to lay off hourly workers, whose employment is more flexible by nature, than salaried workers,” Sanzenbacher said. …Learn More