During the COVID-19 pandemic, tens of millions of U.S. workers lost their jobs, with disproportionately larger employment losses for people with disabilities, women, and people of color.1, 2 Job losses were even greater for people with intersecting marginalized identities (such as Black women with disabilities) compared to people with no disabilities or people who are marginalized along only one dimension.3 For others, especially those in white-collar jobs, company lockdowns forced the adoption of telecommuting arrangements.4 Emerging evidence suggests that worker productivity, job satisfaction, and retention have improved with work from home arrangements during the pandemic.5

This unprecedented growth of telework may have lasting effects on employers’ acceptance of telework as an accommodation for people with disabilities.6 Regarding employment rights of people with disabilities, “Changing the location where work is performed may fall under the ADA’s reasonable accommodation requirement of modifying workplace policies…”7 However, courts have generally held that employers are not obligated to adopt worker preferences for telework, and many employers have been resistant to it.8, 9, 10 This issue has emerged out of both case law and employer determinations, and notably, the demographic characteristics of the people requesting the accommodations affect how both judges and employers decide whether a request is reasonable.9

Telework can be particularly valuable for many people with disabilities.11, 12 It provides flexibility for those with impairments that impede working in traditional office settings, such as those with conditions requiring frequent breaks from work, remaining close to medical equipment, recurring medical appointments, or dealing with unpredictable flare-ups of their conditions. While valuable for all workers, reduced commuting time and expense may be especially beneficial for people with mobility impairments who find it difficult or costly to travel outside the home. Telework can also enable job retention and may help ensure that pay levels and raises are determined more by actual performance and qualifications than by stereotypes and work cultures that have been shown to disadvantage workers with disabilities.13 Telework can be particularly helpful for older individuals with disabilities who are seeking jobs, as employers are often unwilling to hire older people with limited mobility. Viewed through the lens of the capability approach, telework can improve the "capability sets" of older people with disabilities who are seeking employment but facing the double stigma of age and disability.14, 15

These potential advantages must be measured against the potential disadvantages of telework, which include greater social isolation, increasingly blurred lines between work and home life, and being “out of sight, out of mind” for promotion and training opportunities. The isolation could be particularly harmful given that employment is a primary means of social integration in American society. By limiting opportunities for people with disabilities to be better integrated into the social fabric of their communities, the shift to telework could have unintended adverse consequences. However, these limitations must be balanced against the likelihood that telework will increase integration for people with disabilities who would not be employed without it.

Note that telework is not feasible for every type of job. For example, many service and blue-collar jobs must be performed in person. These occupations were especially hard-hit amid the pandemic–the sectors in which people with disabilities are disproportionately employed. Sectors in which a larger proportion of workers could not work remotely experienced larger declines in employment due to the pandemic.16 However, during tight labor markets, employers typically lower barriers to hiring, so once states began to recover from the pandemic and experienced declining unemployment, we would expect to see an increase in employment for people with disabilities and other marginalized groups. An interesting question is how tighter labor markets affect the opportunity for telework for people with disabilities.

Little is known about the effects of telework on workers with disabilities. Some evidence indicates that accommodations, including working from home, help employees with disabilities stay attached to the labor force,17 but home-based work does not appear to reduce disability pay disparities.11

To address this gap, our study examines the extent to which people with disabilities worked from home due to COVID-19, how this changed as the pandemic progressed, and the role of the occupational structure and tight labor markets. We first use annual data from the American Community Survey to examine the increase in the likelihood of primarily working from home as the pandemic began in 2020. We then use monthly data from the Current Population Survey during the pandemic to explain disability differences in pandemic-related telework and the effects of tight labor markets on the probability of pandemic-related telework and non-telework employment. Results point to both the limitations of telework for people with disabilities as well as new opportunities with tightening labor markets.