The Making of a Reserve Army of Labor: Paradoxes of American Disability Policy

Abstract

Since the 1980s, despite much United States legislation to promote the employment of people with disabilities and reduce their reliance on government benefits, employment rates among people with disabilities have fallen while rates of disability benefits receipt have risen. I conducted historical research on two sites of contradiction in the state treatment of disability: (1) antidiscrimination legislation and (2) disability benefits. I show that the goals of antidiscrimination legislation were undercut by court interpretations of this legislation, while cyclical expansion and contraction of disability benefits produced haphazard integration of recipients into the labor force and inhibited cessation of benefits. These findings demonstrate that the legislative push for the labor market inclusion of disabled people, undertaken simultaneous to ongoing labor market exclusion with roots in the very same legislative program, led to the incorporation of disabled people into the labor market on contingent terms. Contradictions in disability employment policy have thus constituted people with disabilities as a labor force suited to the precarious positions characteristic of economic restructuring. This argument develops Marxist theories of disability, conceptualizing disabled people as a reserve army of labor malleable to the needs of capital.