Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

by Sunaura Taylor

The unemployment rate for disabled people around the world is also staggeringly high. According to a UN report, “In developing countries, 80 percent to 90 percent of persons with disabilities of working age are unemployed, whereas in industrialized countries the figure is between 50 percent and 70 percent.”25 Even with disabled people in the workforce rising in recent years, only 37 percent of working-age persons with disabilities in the United States are employed.26 All of these numbers are worse for disabled women and disabled people of color. Senator Tom Harkin has written that things aren’t looking up: “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the disability workforce shrank by over 10 percent during the recession, five times faster than the non-disability workforce, which shrank by only about two percent.”27