Kira Khazatsky
JVS Boston President and CEO
It was a tremendous honor for all of us at JVS Boston to welcome Massachusetts Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Lauren Jones, leaders of the Commonwealth Corporation, and other distinguished guests to our Boston offices on April 30 for not just one but two tremendously important announcements about empowering people with disabilities to participate more fully in our workplaces.
In addition to announcing $900,000 in Employment Programs for Young Adults With Disabilities training grants to nine organizations, JVS Boston among them, Secretary Jones also used this event as the occasion to unveil the Commonwealth’s new People With Disabilities in the Massachusetts Workforce Data Dashboard.
It’s hard for me to overstate what a big deal the availability of this new dashboard is for illuminating and informing the work of all of us in the Massachusetts workforce development sector. We have long known that workers with disabilities can and do play a key role in the Massachusetts economy, but we’ve never had, in one easily accessible source, the detailed data that both highlights the achievements of people with disabilities in the workforce and documents how specific supports can increase the earnings and participation rate of Massachusetts citizens with disabilities.
Thanks to the dashboard, which draws on several sources of U.S. Census data, we now know that 360 percent more Massachusetts residents with disabilities were participating in remote work in 2022 compared to 2019. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic made remote work a widespread practice, our friends and allies in the disability had been making the case that empowering workers to do jobs remotely could significantly increase the participation of people with disabilities in the workforce–and now it has been proven just how right they were.
The dashboard also reveals significant differences in employment and unemployment rates for people with disabilities across the Commonwealth. Among the state’s five biggest cities, for example, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities in Worcester is 12.1 percent and in Lowell it’s 12.7 percent, but it tops out at 22.8 percent in Springfield. Unemployment for people with disabilities tends to be significantly higher in Western Massachusetts and the Lower Merrimack Valley than suburbs ringing Boston, suggesting we need to take a closer look at local factors helping and hindering workforce engagement by people with disabilities, including the need for expanded training and coaching.
As several of us at the event noted: Between the enormous number of available jobs still going unfilled, the intense demand by Massachusetts employers for talent, the new opportunities created by remote work to lower barriers to employment, and the power of the new Data Dashboard to show what’s succeeding and where we need more focus, this is an incredible moment of opportunity for connecting far more people with disabilities to fulfilling, in-demand jobs. It will be a shame if we fail fully to leverage the opportunity we now have to fully engage the capabilities and talents of people with disabilities.
As I said in my remarks Tuesday: “What has been is not what is possible. What’s possible is much bigger–and much more exciting.”