Over One Million Australians with Disability are Working
29 March 2012 at 10:06 am
Over one million working-age people with disability were working in 2009, according to the latest report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
The ABS says people with disability who were working were more likely to work part-time, work from home and/or run their own business than employed people without disability.
Around half (54%) of working-age people with disability participated in the labour force in 2009, compared with 83% of working-age people without disability. The type and severity of disability influenced people's employment.
People with sensory or speech disability had the best work outcomes, with a 54% participation rate and a 7.0% unemployment rate. Half (53%) of those with moderate or mild disability participated in the labour force while those with profound or severe disability had a participation rate of nearly a third (31%).
The statistics are part of the ABS Australian Social Trends (March 2012) which draw on a wide range of data, sourced both from ABS and other agencies, to present a picture of Australian society.
The latest publication also says that in 2009-10, one in five (20% or 1.7 million) households were classified as having low economic resources, that is, both relatively low income and relatively low wealth. Low economic resource households were particularly vulnerable to financial stress. Around a quarter (24%) of low economic resource households reported spending more money than they received most weeks, twice the rate of other households (12%).
The average income of people in low economic resource households in 2009-10 was less than half the average income for people in other households. The wealth of low economic resource households was one tenth that of other households.
More information for the March edition can be found at Australian Social Trends (cat. no. 4102.0)
