As we continue our celebration of National Disability Employment Awareness Month, we’re exploring the complex ways that the pandemic has impacted workers with disabilities.  

This article from WHYY focuses on the massive shift to at-home work that has occurred during the pandemic. 

Through interviews with people with disabilities about their pre-pandemic experience in the workplace, the story unearths a glaring hypocrisy: accommodations that were frequently deemed “unreasonable” for workers with disabilities before 2020—such as working from home—were quickly adopted as reasonable and commonplace once the pandemic made them necessary for non-disabled workers.  

As Jason Olsen put it, a former employee of the Social Security Administration who became paralyzed from the chest down due to a spinal cord injury, the pandemic showed that “when it wasn’t just disabled people that needed it, when everybody needed it, [only] then it was something that can be done.”