Jobs Friday: The problem with disability support

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2022

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Social Security Disability Insurance helps support millions of Americans, but it's a slow-moving program that rejects most people who apply.

This Jobs Friday: The 10 million working-age people who are neither working nor seeking a job — and they're living with a disability.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:03.0	The labour market has more or less bounced back to what it was prior to the pandemic.
0:17.0	Today's jobs numbers show 263,000 jobs were added to the US economy in September and the
0:23.4	unemployment rate dropped to 3.5%.
0:27.7	But that recovery does not mean that everybody works.
0:31.4	10 million Americans are working age with a disability and not in the labour force.
0:37.6	These are Americans like Rich Fantasia and Rich loves sound and he loves playing with sound.
0:44.0	Like back in 2013 before his disability he was performing at a local TEDx event at Stonu
0:50.3	Brook University in New York.
0:52.3	What's taking down in TEDxown? How y'all doing? That was pretty cool. I went around campus
0:58.7	and I recorded a bunch of sounds from the different spaces and then I made music with the sounds
1:04.2	from the spaces. This was pretty fun.
1:08.2	Rich also worked at Stonu Brook as an audiovisual technician, helping these instructors that
1:16.4	were older, they had some trouble with the technology and helping them communicate to the students.
1:23.3	And I just felt like I was doing something that was important.
1:27.7	Then in 2014 Rich was out driving and a guy had a bicycle and decided he wanted to try
1:33.8	to cross and so everyone just slammed on the brakes.
1:37.3	It was a serious car crash and that moment changed Rich's life.
1:45.1	He would have to leave the work he loved. He would join the millions of Americans who
1:49.7	aren't in a job and aren't looking for a job either.
1:54.4	This is the indicator from Planet Money, I'm Darian Woods.
1:57.3	For today's Jobs Friday, Americans with Disabilities Without a Job.
	...

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