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.

Introduction

In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was lauded as a harbinger of the mass entrance of disabled people into the labor force. As the preamble to the ADA summarized its aims,

the Nation’s proper goals regarding individuals with disabilities are to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for such individuals . . . the continuing existence of unfair and unnecessary discrimination and prejudice denies people with disabilities the opportunity to compete on an equal basis and to pursue those opportunities for which our free society is justifiably famous, and costs the United States billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses resulting from dependency and nonproductivity. (US Congress, 1990: 3, emphasis added)

The ADA aimed to eliminate discrimination in the workplace so as to increase disabled people’s ‘economic self-sufficiency’ and decrease their receipt of federal disability benefits. While the ADA represented the most notorious legislative push for disabled employment, several major bills which shared the same goals passed Congress in the final decades of the 20th century, including the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (which prohibited certain forms of discrimination and funded job training for workers with disabilities) and the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act (TWWIIA) of 1999 (which incentivized cessation of disability benefits). This legislative agenda continued into the 21st century through the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014, among other bills. Following these bills, legislators and commentators anticipated increasing employment among disabled people and decreasing reliance on federal disability benefits.

However, 30 years after the passage of the ADA, the opposite trends have emerged. Employment rates among people with disabilities have fallen, while rates of benefit receipt have risen. From 1988 to 2014, employment rates for people with disabilities fell steadily from nearly 50% to approximately 20% (Pettinicchio, 2019: 210; see Maroto and Pettinicchio, 2014b for details of this analysis). Over the same period, rates of receipt of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased dramatically, with approximately 3 million workers receiving these benefits in 1980 (Social Security Administration (SSA), 2006) and nearly 13 million receiving SSDI in 2020 (SSA, 2020). The other major disability program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), has also expanded from approximately 2 million recipients in 1980 (SSA, 2006) to approximately 8 million in 2020 (SSA, 2020). These trends are not adequately explained by growth in the eligible population (Autor, 2015). ¹ What explains this contradiction between the stated goals of disability employment policy and the apparent effects of this legislative program?

To make sense of this paradox, I conducted historical research on disability employment legislation and policy 1980s–present, including oral history interviews, research within primary document collections including Congressional records, government reports, and news coverage, and review of secondary histories of relevant institutions and events. I show that the stated goals of antidiscrimination legislation were persistently undercut by the interpretation of this legislation in state and federal courts, with this legislative program ultimately negatively affecting the position of people with disabilities in many industries. Furthermore, I show that recurring cycles of backlash against disability benefits fueled policy drift, which undercut the livability of disability benefits over time, leading to the integration of recipients into the labor force primarily through low-wage, temporary, and informal work and inhibiting permanent cessation of benefits. These findings demonstrate that the legislative push for the labor market inclusion of disabled people, undertaken in concert with ongoing labor market exclusion with roots in the very same legislative program, led to the incorporation of disabled people into the labor market on highly contingent terms. I use these historical data to theorize disabled people as a reserve army of labor malleable to the needs of capital, developing Marxist understandings of disability, particularly the work of disability activist and writer Marta Russell.

Disability and the Reserve Army of Labor

Marxist theory suggests that disability demarcates the reserve army of labor. According to Marx, the existence and maintenance of a ‘reserve army’ of poor job-seekers at the fringes of the economy is crucial to capitalist accumulation (Denning, 2010; Foster et al., 2011; Magdoff and Magdoff, 2004). As Marx (1978) himself defines this reserve army,

this surplus population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost . . . it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation. (p. 423)

Members of the reserve army may function as strikebreakers, as fresh labor in periods of economic expansion, or as replacements for workers exhausted by poor working conditions. A supply of applicants desperate enough to take any job available enables corporations to exploit their current workers, as if these current workers consider wages and working conditions inadequate, they can be rapidly replaced. Marxist theory thus identifies some level of unemployment as a feature of capitalism, not a bug. Furthermore, it predicts the ongoing enlargement of the reserve army of labor as capitalism develops (Marx, 1978: 429–430).

In recent years, the concept of the industrial reserve army been taken up to theorize populations rendered surplus to capital through neoliberal transformations. This literature probes the exclusion of vast populations in the global South, and to a lesser extent the global North, from the capitalist labor process following new tools of automation and political technologies of exclusion (Sassen, 2014; Watts, 2011). Denning (2010) offers a particularly important reformulation of Marx with his notion of ‘wageless life’ as the base condition of capitalism, writing that ‘capitalism begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living’ (p. 80). The dispossession of the masses through primitive accumulation leaves people unable to survive outside the labor market, constituting them as ‘wageless’ as the first step to the formation of the proletariat. A theory of capitalism beginning not with wages but with wagelessness shifts the empirical emphasis, with Denning (2010) writing, ‘It is not the child in the sweatshop that is our most characteristic figure, but the child in the streets’ (p. 79). Some of this research distinguishes between the active reserve army, engaged in work on the fringes of the labor force and in emergent industries, and the passive reserve army or lumpenproletariat, whose exclusion is more persistent yet just as structural to capitalism as it compresses existing workers’ wages and working conditions (Barrow, 2020). ² According to this literature, understanding the social situations of those excluded from work may be crucial to making sense of contemporary capitalism.

Marxist disability theory identifies disabled people as part of the reserve army of labor, drawing especially on historical data on the industrial revolution. Historical research shows that in the transition to capitalism, disability emerged as a new social category defined by disabled people’s exclusion from wage labor and perceived drain on social resources. Up until the mid-19th century, ‘disability’ did not operate as a cohesive category; rather different physical and mental differences were understood independently of one another and often normalized to an extent. Rose’s (2017) account of emergent disability stigma identifies four major factors in the construction of disability: first, the transition to a wage economy reduced familial capacity to care for impaired relatives; second, the rise of mechanized factory labor led employers to reject workers with bodily and mental differences; third, policies to prevent dependency created new categories to classify bodily and mental differences; and fourth, programs intended to serve this new population of ‘disabled people’ pulled them out of the labor force. While Rose offers the most systematic history of this process, other scholarship supports her claims (Gleeson, 1999; Nibert, 1995; Oliver, 1990; Russell and Malhotra, 2002; Stone, 1984). Disability thus emerged as a stigmatized category associated with dependency in the transition to capitalism. This category facilitated the exploitation of nondisabled workers, who defined themselves in opposition to the idleness associated with disability. In its earliest articulations, disability was thus defined by exclusion from paid work and as a category constituting the industrial reserve army.

Marxist disability research has not adequately accounted for subsequent shifts in capitalism. As the introduction to this paper suggested, disability rights claims in the late 20th century were often grounded in the potential productivity of disabled people. Organizers and legislators sought to integrate people with disabilities into the workforce, a political project entailing the redefinition of disability, given its categorical links to unemployment in the public imaginary and in the preexisting policy regime. This redefinition project emerged at the same time as neoliberalism took hold as a global political economic regime. Neoliberalism refers to the massive privatization and rollback of social services undertaken worldwide during the 1980s and 1990s, which has produced increasing commodification in many domains, including increasing commodification of human labor. Connections between the development of neoliberalism and the reconstitution of disability as a category demarcating labor market integration are a crucial frontier for research. Did antidiscrimination legislation or legislative and regulatory attempts to reduce disability benefits represent neoliberal transformations, and what are the analytic implications of theorizing them as such?

The leading theorist conceptualizing the late 20th century wave of disability employment legislation as a neoliberal regime is Marta Russell, a writer and disability activist who analyzed these policy developments in real time across the disability press. Despite her work’s influence across disability communities and movements, it has been neglected by academics, necessitating the theoretical reconstruction developed in this paper. While Russell devoted her professional life to the amelioration of disability discrimination, she was highly critical of the ADA, identifying it as a fundamentally conservative bill. She writes of the ADA, ‘Getting disabled people off welfare, reducing government spending – this disability rights thing was a Republican wet dream if there ever was one’ (Russell, 1998: 113). Indeed, as I discuss subsequently, the ADA received significant Republican support on these grounds. Russell identifies the ADA as in line with workfare and other cuts to welfare spending during the 1980s and 1990s, and she and her peers paired this critique of the ADA with analysis of cuts to disability benefits during the 1990s. Writing in 1998, Russell critiqued the Reagan administration policy of continuing reviews to cut off disability benefits for long-standing recipients and changes to the definition of disability which might limit the eligibility of some populations, and identified ‘ominous signs’ of upcoming massive cuts to the disability rolls (p. 153). Other contemporaries of Russell criticized the impossibility of combining disability benefits with stable, living-wage work and suggested that work disincentives forced people with disabilities into precarious economic positions (Longmore, 2003).

Russell draws upon Marxism to theorize disabled workers as a reserve army of labor, as I do. However, writing in the 1990s, Russell predicted labor market inclusion as the primary outcome of emergent disability employment policy, neglecting the ongoing practices of exclusion addressed in this paper and thus oversimplifying the neoliberal treatment of disability. Russell (2019) writes of the ADA, ‘The administration’s primary intent is to use the new army of labor to put downward pressure on the now rising wages in a tight labor market’ (p. 25). Following the ADA and related antidiscrimination and benefits legislation, Russell (2019) predicted increasing employment of disabled workers through the 1990s and 2000s ‘because the macro economy demands enlarging the active reserve army’ (p. 25; see also Mitchell and Snyder, 2015; Soldatic, 2018, 2019). While I assent to Russell’s characterization of this legislative program’s stated aims, I use the mismatch between Russell’s prediction and the actual employment outcomes of this policy regime to test and extend her theory.

This mismatch between Russell’s prediction and the employment outcomes of people with disabilities highlights an important ambiguity in theories of the industrial reserve army. Does the reserve army of labor refer to the unemployed population, as in much classical and contemporary Marxism, or to populations newly drawn into the labor force, as in Russell and other Marxist disability perspectives? This distinction maps approximately onto the Marxist distinction between the passive and active segments of the reserve army, yet the research literature on disability and neoliberalism conflates the two, making use only of the active reserve army concept. Russell uses the active reserve army concept to indicate the predicted trend of increased workforce integration, but does not recognize ongoing labor force exclusion (what Soldatic (2018) calls ‘surplusisity’) as a potential attribute of the reserve army of labor. She thus neglects the possibility that this ongoing labor market exclusion may be functional for capitalism, as suggested by the literature on surplus populations as a passive reserve army (Barrow, 2020; Denning, 2010). I modify Russell’s argument by arguing that rising unemployment levels among people with disabilities are themselves evidence of disability as a category demarcating the reserve army of labor, and furthermore, that these unemployment levels are functional for capitalism by driving down wages for all as they increase the size of the available labor force if not the actual labor force. Disability demarcates the passive reserve army of labor as much as the active reserve army, and the reserve army concept developed in this paper encompasses both categories. This paper thus complicates the conceptualization of the reserve army in disability studies, illuminating ongoing labor force exclusion as a constitutive element. This (re)definition of the reserve army of labor through simultaneous exclusion and inclusion is important for making sense of disability under contemporary capitalism.

Furthermore, I diverge from Russell in my conceptualization of the state’s coherence and intent. Russell’s work suggests a high degree of intent among state actors, suggesting that policymakers consciously conspired to integrate disabled people into the labor force as a reserve army. Her implicit instrumentalist theory of the state identifies it as a unified, ‘thinking’ actor. By contrast, this paper identifies the constitution of people with disabilities as a reserve army of labor as an unanticipated outcome of legislative transformations, though this outcome is functional for capitalism and has thus been permitted to persist. For example, many legislators truly hoped that the ADA would reduce employment discrimination, yet pro-employer court decisions took advantage of contradictions embedded in the legislation to erode its protections. Similarly, I argue that the livability of disability benefits has eroded more through processes of policy drift than through intentional cuts to benefits, even as this policy drift has been enabled by the cultural devaluation of people with disabilities. This analysis is grounded in a very different theory of the state than that held by prior Marxist analysts of disability (most notably Russell, 1998, 2019, but see also Clifford, 2022; Soldatic, 2018, 2019; Ryan, 2019). Specifically, my analysis treats contradiction and multiplicity as fundamental characteristics of capitalist states, and does not analyze the state as a thinking agent. I argue that the United States government reproduces capitalism (and disability as a category under capitalism) not exclusively through the conscious decisions of state actors, but through the unconscious coordination of state effects. In short, I take a structuralist position on the state contra Russell’s instrumentalism (see Miliband, 1970; Poulantzas, 1969, 1976 on structuralist versus instrumentalist approaches in Marxist theory, or Das, 1996 for a review).

My central argument draws on prior work on state contradictions (Haney, 1996; Morgan and Orloff, 2017; Offe, 1984) and specifically the contradictory treatment of disability (Bagenstos, 2009; Ruppel, 2023). As described earlier, research on the development of disability as a social category suggests that this category was produced in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Historically, the inability to work productively has constituted disability in the public view, and to this day, many state agencies define disability as a set of conditions limiting the ability to work for pay. However, in the last several decades, collusion between disability rights organizers and fiscal conservatives has redefined disability on the basis of disabled people’s potential productivity. This tension between disability rights paradigms based in productivity and the long-standing definition of disability as the inability to work productively is the focus of Bagenstos’ (2009) critique of antidiscrimination law. Current constructions of disability indicate simultaneously that disabled people cannot work, yet to justify the worth of their lives, disabled people must work. I argue that the intrinsic contradiction of disability as a social category defined by low productivity, yet symbolically reformulated in the late 20th century as a political identifier contingent upon productivity, constitutes disabled people as a reserve army of labor and contributes to poor wages and working conditions for this population when it enters the labor force and for all nondisabled workers under neoliberalism.

Research Design

This paper draws upon primary and secondary historical research on disability benefits and antidiscrimination legislation. A significant literature across history, political science, economics, and sociology documents the passage and adjudicates the effectiveness of the ADA. Other key pieces of legislation, such as the TWWIIA, have received more limited attention. I synthesize these literatures and supplement them with primary historical research, drawing especially upon Congressional records and period news coverage. In addition, between 2021 and 2023, I conducted 42 original interviews with key figures in the disability employment field including disability activists, labor union leaders, government agents, and representatives of vocational rehabilitation programs. Interviewees were identified through a combination of secondary research and snowball sampling. While I discuss some data on the labor market outcomes of people with disabilities, legislative history is my empirical focus; I do not present any novel findings on the present (un)employment situations of people with disabilities. More generally, while these historical data supplement the empirical findings of prior literature, the paper’s contribution is primarily theoretical, reinterpreting the extensive existing literature on antidiscrimination and benefits legislation through a Marxist disability lens.

This paper is part of a larger historical and ethnographic project about disability under neoliberalism. This project incorporates historical research on other institutions structuring disability labor politics, particularly state- and privately funded job training programs for disabled workers and legislation permitting the payment of subminimum wages to disabled workers. In addition, this project involves ethnographic research in two programs employing workers with disabilities, one funded by the state. While I do not discuss findings from these other empirical domains, findings contributed secondarily to the development of the theoretical framework presented in this paper, and they sensitize me to relevant themes in the historical record on disability benefits and antidiscrimination legislation.

Disability Legislation and Rising Unemployment, 1980s–Present

Anti-Discrimination Legislation

Disability antidiscrimination legislation, and particularly the ADA, represents one of the most significant bipartisan accomplishments of the last several decades. The George H. W. Bush administration constructed the ADA as a major Republican achievement, but it was passed through collaboration with a Democratic Congress, with sponsors drawn from both sides of the aisle. Pettinicchio (2019) argues that in the 1980s, the disability rights strategy ‘made disability rights politically uncontroversial – as “American as apple pie” – creating an attractive, nonpartisan issue readily taken up by freshman members of Congress and ambitious administration officials’ (pp. 16–17; see also 23–26, 118, 123). Historical research identifies this strategy as a response to the political opportunity structure of the 1980s, given conservative control of several branches of the federal government (Davis, 2015; Pettinicchio, 2019). Measured in legislative achievements, this strategy was wildly successful. Colker’s (2005) history of the ADA characterizes it as ‘unlike any other major piece of civil rights legislation enacted by Congress because there was no serious opposition’ (p. 23), with the limited opposition focused on specific stigmatized disability categories (e.g. substance addiction). The ADA’s explicit appeals to conservatives, who have historically been critical of civil rights legislation, secured its 1988 passage.

Politicians’ rhetoric and the reception of the ADA emphasized the potential economic productivity of disabled workers. As discussed previously, the text of the ADA signaled this productivity as its major aim, and the implications for business were the focus of Bush’s speech upon signing the ADA. As Bush summarized,

This act does something important for American business, though—and remember this: You’ve called for new sources of workers. Well, many of our fellow citizens with disabilities are unemployed. They want to work, and they can work . . . this is a tremendous pool of people who will bring to jobs diversity, loyalty, proven low turnover rate, and only one request: the chance to prove themselves. And when you add together Federal, State, local, and private funds, it costs almost $200 billion annually to support Americans with disabilities—in effect, to keep them dependent. Well, when given the opportunity to be independent, they will move proudly into the economic mainstream of American life, and that’s what this legislation is all about. (Bush, 1990)

This identification of people with disabilities as a ‘tremendous pool of people’, a ‘new sourc[e] of workers’, names disabled people as a reserve army of labor who might be brought into the workforce when businesses’ needs demand. Furthermore, Bush’s positive reference to the ‘proven low turnover rate’ of workers with disabilities identifies them as an especially compliant labor supply. His statement that disabled workers have ‘only one request: the chance to prove themselves’ negates demands for disability accommodations, living wages, and other labor market protections. This positive view of disabled workers’ low turnover rate, itself the result of real and anticipated discrimination, and erasure of any workplace needs supports Russell’s (1998, 2019) interpretation of the ADA as a bill to serve capitalists’ hiring needs rather than ameliorate discrimination. Other representatives of the Bush Administration made similar claims, in some instances explicitly linking the integration of disabled people into the workforce with macroeconomic conditions. For instance, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman stated in a coalition meeting, ‘The last big group of people in this country who could keep the economy going strong with low inflation are Americans with disabilities . . . who are not in the workforce’ (quoted on Russell, 2019: 25). Economic shifts during the 1980s and 1990s demanded the integration of new groups into the labor force; prior research identifies neoliberal initiatives such as workfare as state responses to these demands (Peck, 2001). Politicians in the 1990s identified disabled workers as serving a similar economic function.

Business interests lauded this aspect of the ADA. For example, a 1991 Business Week article about the ADA stated,

[O]ne of the hidden keys to profitability may be a large and growing bloc of Americans – people with disabilities. . . in a decade in which willing and able workers will be increasingly hard to find, the nearly nine million working age Americans with disabilities now outside the job market may be one of the best sources of new employees. (quoted on Russell, 2019: 24)

Three years later, Business Week coverage argued that following the passage of the ADA, hiring disabled people would ‘become a strategy for profitability – a new competitive advantage in the search for capable workers’ (quoted on Russell, 2019: 33). This construction of disabled workers as profit-generating exemplifies neoliberal rhetoric about disability. It specifically identifies the hiring of disabled workers as a profitable strategy during periods of low overall unemployment, the historical moments where Marxist theory posits that capital dips into the reserve army of labor.

However, this emphasis on profit produced contradictions, which undercut the anti-discrimination provisions of the ADA in the long term. Seventh Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner cited the rhetoric of profitability surrounding the ADA to justify a 1995 ruling, which limited the protections available to disabled workers:

The preamble actually “markets” the Act as a cost saver, pointing to “billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses resulting from dependency and nonproductivity” . . . The savings will be illusory if employers are required to expend many more billions in accommodation than will be saved by enabling disabled people to work. (quoted on Russell, 2019: 71)

As such, historical accounts of the ADA suggest that its bipartisan passage ultimately inhibited its effects, as the same logics of cost-effectiveness, which were so essential to its passage then prevented its enforcement (Bagenstos, 2009: 45; Pettinicchio, 2019: 19). Employers and courts took up these logics to legitimize the refusal to hire, and in some instances the decision to fire, people with disabilities.

Several aspects of courts’ interpretation of the ADA inhibit its capacity to eradicate employment discrimination. First, courts interpret the ADA’s definition of disability extremely strictly, such that plaintiffs are often deemed nondisabled and thus ineligible to claim discrimination even when their employers explicitly cite disability as the basis for employment decisions (Bagenstos, 2009; Colker, 2005; Maroto and Pettinicchio, 2014b). Second, courts define the ADA’s accommodation mandate much more narrowly than disability advocates recommend, exempting employers from even minimally costly accommodations (Bagenstos, 2009; Colker, 2005; O’Brien, 2012). Additional court-backed loopholes for employers include the identification of disability as a threat to workplace safety (Bagenstos, 2009) and the classification of workers as nondisabled if they can mitigate their conditions, for example, through medication (Bagenstos, 2009; O’Brien, 2012).

A core tension in the interpretation of the ADA is the mandate that workers show, simultaneously, that their disability is severe enough to ‘generally foreclose’ them from major classes of occupations, yet not so severe to mark them less than ‘otherwise qualified’ or requiring assistance beyond ‘reasonable accommodations’. The courts have developed a ‘general foreclosure test’ to demonstrate disability, requiring workers to prove that they are unemployable in the majority of jobs in their geographic area on the basis of their disabilities and in some instances requiring them to show proof of failed applications to these jobs (O’Brien, 2012: 82). If they fail to prove this level of unemployability, they are deemed nondisabled and thus ineligible to claim ADA protections. However, the ADA only protects ‘otherwise qualified’ individuals from employment discrimination, and only when their disabilities require no more than ‘reasonable accommodation’ to ‘perform the essential functions of the job in question’. If accommodations are too expensive or time-consuming, or if employers report that workers’ disabilities inhibit essential work functions, employers are authorized to make hiring and firing decisions on the basis of disability. In short, to claim antidiscrimination protections, plaintiffs must simultaneously be too disabled for most work, yet not so disabled as for their disabilities to have a significant impact on their work performance. This contradiction exemplifies the tension introduced earlier in this paper: in the contemporary United States, disability is defined simultaneously by the inability to work productively and the mandate to work productively.

As a result of these interpretative decisions, plaintiffs in disability employment discrimination cases win fewer than 10% of these cases (Colker, 1999, 2005; O’Brien, 2012). In the first decade of the ADA, 80% of employment discrimination cases were thrown out on summary judgment (meaning, in most instances, that plaintiffs were judged nondisabled and thus ineligible to bring suit), and 94% of the remaining cases were initially decided in the employer’s favor, though a handful of these decisions were overturned on appeal (Colker, 1999). In the United States, prisoners represent the only plaintiff category with a lower win rate (Colker, 1999). On the whole, the ADA thus fails to protect people with disabilities from employment discrimination.

This series of pro-employer court decisions prevented the ADA from raising employment rates among people with disabilities, and indeed some research suggests it has lowered these employment rates. Some researchers argue that following the ADA, employers’ willingness to hire people with disabilities has declined, as they perceive these hires as risking costly accommodations or litigation (Acemoglu and Angrist, 2001; DeLeire, 1995). These analyses are somewhat controversial, with other scholars acknowledging factors beyond the ADA, which may have depressed employment rates among disabled workers (Bagenstos, 2009: 118; Maroto and Pettinicchio, 2014b), including the transformations in benefits described in the next section of this paper. However, the overall trend of declining employment rates following the ADA is uncontested among scholars (for reviews, see Bagenstos, 2009; Colker, 2005; Maroto and Pettinicchio, 2014b; Maroto and Pettinicchio, 2015). Rhetoric about the potential productivity of workers with disabilities fueled the passage of the ADA, yet these same logics inhibited its power to ameliorate employment discrimination, as this discrimination is often legitimized by economic logics.

On the whole, antidiscrimination legislation thus advances the incorporation of people with disabilities into the workforce on contingent terms. This legislation promotes the cultural project of workplace integration, criticizing disabled ‘dependency’ on benefits and identifying paid work as the foundation of disability liberation. However, in material terms, this legislation fails to secure access to workplace accommodations or protection from bias, and may even destabilize the labor market position of people with disabilities by stimulating employers’ sense of the riskiness of hiring disabled workers. Antidiscrimination legislation thus performs the imperative for people with disabilities to seek work and for businesses to draw upon them as a pool of surplus workers without providing the protections needed for people with disabilities to consistently secure stable, living-wage work. It thus contributes to the constitution of people with disabilities as a reserve army of labor.

Disability Benefits

The two major federal disability benefits programs, SSDI and SSI, were not subject to legislative realignment on the scale of the ADA over this period. SSDI serves people with a prior work history, while SSI serves people with limited prior work experience, a poorer population on average. However, over the last four decades, two dynamics contributed to these programs’ emergent power to regulate the fringes of the labor market: (1) cyclical expansion and contraction of the benefit rolls in response to the pendulum of public opinion and (2) the declining livability of benefits over time. At present, more Americans than ever before receive federal disability benefits, but these benefits are also substantially harder to survive on than at previous time points. As such, I argue that over the last few decades, SSI and SSDI have developed into increasingly important tools to demarcate and regulate disabled workers as a reserve army of labor.

Prior histories of disability benefits demonstrate that administrative decision-making has been responsive to cyclical public backlash against the program (see especially Berkowitz and DeWitt, 2013; Erkulwater, 2006). During the 1980s, an emergent public consensus against excessive federal spending on disability benefits led the SSA to initiate a series of ‘Continuing Reviews’, evaluating sets of disability cases and cutting off benefits to recipients deemed no longer eligible. However, following a series of highly publicized suicides of people with disabilities after the cessation of their benefits (Berkowitz and DeWitt, 2013; Erkulwater, 2006; Martin, 2002), many commentators condemned this original conservative backlash. Therefore, in the late 1980s, a series of court decisions forced the SSA to slow its continuing reviews and expand access to benefits along several dimensions (Berkowitz and DeWitt, 2013; Erkulwater, 2006). A second, smaller cycle of backlash and contraction, then backlash to the backlash and expansion, ensued in the 1990s (Berkowitz and DeWitt, 2013; Erkulwater, 2006). These patterns align with Piven and Cloward’s (1993) general theory of the cyclical expansion and contraction of welfare. While the net effect of these backlash cycles may be null, this cyclical expansion and contraction has driven a subjective sense of the unreliability of benefits among people with disabilities (Martin, 2002; Russell, 1998). Overall, these cycles thus contribute to the contemporary character of disability benefits as widely distributed, yet unstable for individual recipients—a broad yet thin social safety net.

These cycles of public and administrative backlash have driven concern among Marxist disability theorists about cuts to disability benefits as an aspect of the neoliberal treatment of disability (Russell, 1998, 2019; Soldatic, 2018). However, in many cases, these theorists merely catch the low point of the contraction–expansion cycle. Many of the cuts Russell (1998, 2019) decries were erased by subsequent reforms. Taking a longer view, the expansion of disability benefits has in fact been as crucial to neoliberalism as occasional contractions of benefits. Following cuts to welfare in the 1990s, many members of the indigent poor were shuffled off more general assistance programs and onto disability benefits, a transformation that some scholars term the medicalization of welfare (Hansen et al., 2014; Wong, 2016). Qualitative research shows that contemporary welfare state agents guide the poor toward disability benefits in place of other resources in social service fields including homeless sheltering (Gowan, 2010; Lyon-Callo, 2000) and domestic violence services (Sweet, 2015, 2021). This medicalization of welfare legitimizes a high level of state intervention in the lives of the poor and has thus been theorized as an aspect of neoliberal poverty governance (Gowan, 2010; Lyon-Callo, 2000; Nolan, 1998; Polsky, 1993; Sweet, 2021). Furthermore, because disability benefits are so precarious, they push people with disabilities toward low-wage, part-time jobs and work under the table, filling in gaps in the neoliberal economy.

The livability of disability benefits has eroded over time due to what scholars term the ‘benefits trap’ (Dorfman, 2015; Longmore, 2003; Newman, 2015; Olney and Lyle, 2011; Stapleton et al., 2006). Current benefit levels place SSI recipients at approximately 75% of the federal poverty level for individuals, while SSDI recipients subsist around the poverty line. As such, although benefits are meant to support people with disabilities which prevent them from working, prior research (Savin, 2019) and interviews with vocational rehabilitation providers show that many people with disabilities seek work to supplement these meager benefits. However, benefits means-testing prevents them from obtaining stable, living-wage jobs. Earnings and savings caps have received only limited upward adjustments since the 1980s, a major concern for disability activists interviewed for this study. For example, a policy director at a major national organization stated:

[W]e we set SGA, the substantial gainful activity level, which is the max amount of money you can earn when you’re on disability benefits, back in the 80s. And we haven’t adjusted it since. It gets a COLA [cost of living adjustment] every year, but it hasn’t changed based on inflation, it hasn’t adjusted to living wage numbers, it hasn’t—it’s just completely unrealistic for today’s—[on SSDI] you can earn $1310 a month without losing all the rest of your benefits. And that is not livable in the vast majority of the United States nowadays. So yeah, so we’re effectively trapping people with disabilities in poverty, and it sucks. It’s even worse if you’re on SSI, because you can only—after you make $65, they start taking it out of your benefits. So working to fix those are big priorities of mine.

In addition to the earnings caps described in this quote, SSI recipients are prohibited from holding more than US$2000 in savings at any point. During the 2021 battle over Biden’s proposed Build Back Better bill, disability advocates interviewed for this study sought legislative correction to the eroding value of these caps, but these proposals failed. Harsh earnings and savings caps were not part of the initial design of disability benefits, but rather reflect policy drift (Hacker, 2004), with legislators failing to update these caps as the cost of living rises. Crucially, policy drift is not a neutral process; legislators’ failure to prioritize these updates stems in part from the same devaluation of disabled people, which fueled cycles of backlash (Berkowitz and DeWitt, 2013; Erkulwater, 2006). Presently, the low level of earnings and savings caps disincentivize people with disabilities from obtaining living-wage jobs (Dorfman, 2015; Longmore, 2003; Newman, 2015; Olney and Lyle, 2011; Stapleton et al., 2006). Vocational rehabilitation providers interviewed for this study report that people with disabilities instead seek low-wage, part-time work to avoid exceeding earnings and savings caps. Furthermore, many benefits recipients work in the informal economy, as wages paid under the table can be hidden from the SSA (Savin, 2019). The eroding real value of earnings and savings caps thus constitutes disabled people as a workforce suited to the precarious, low-wage, part-time jobs characteristic of neoliberal restructuring.

Legislators have sought technocratic solutions to the benefits trap, but these technocratic solutions have failed due to their low funding levels. The most notable policy failure in this arena is the Ticket to Work program of the SSA, designed as a benefits off-ramp permitting recipients to combine benefits and work during a trial work period, yet rarely used by recipients. Ticket to Work was established by the TWWIIA of 1999, following a legislative battle that entailed the piecemeal Republican defunding of Democrats’ more ambitious proposals to reform disability benefits to permit recipients to combine social services with work. For instance, Republicans removed funding for technology and personal assistant services used to support employment (Burke and Barnes, 2018: 106), placed strict limits on the benefit amounts which could be combined with work (Burke and Barnes, 2018: 106), and limited benefit recipients’ access to health insurance once they entered the workforce (Martin, 2002: 141). As leading disability lobbyist Douglas Martin stated in an oral history interview, ‘We had a much better bill and it was all the way through the House and Senate. It was just so close. It was a heartbreaker’ (Martin, 2002: 141). As he summarized the final bill, reflecting on its emphasis in Clinton administration public addresses, ‘It was a great public relations campaign, but it really was practically useless when it was passed’ (Martin, 2002: 142). Subsequent evaluations suggest that few benefits recipients are familiar with the Ticket to Work program established by the TWWIIA and that less than 2% of recipients participated in this program (Stapleton et al., 2007). Ticket to Work and other technocratic responses to the benefits trap serve a symbolic function, representing the government’s ideological commitment to work for people with disabilities, yet materially they undercut (or at the very least fail to facilitate) living-wage work.

This combination of symbolic support of work with material barriers to work mirrors the contradictions of anti-discrimination legislation. In both cases, state and corporate actors have repeatedly stated their commitment to the integration of people with disabilities into the workforce, and have initiated programming in service of this integration. However, these state and corporate actors have consistently failed to allocate the resources needed to support workforce integration, including health insurance, personal assistant services, technology, workplace accommodations, and payouts for people facing workplace discrimination. Contradictions in anti-discrimination legislation and benefits programming thus draw people into the workforce on precarious terms, if at all. Therefore, rather than promoting stable, integrated, living-wage work, this legislative program produces and maintains disabled workers as a reserve army of labor.

Labor Market Outcomes

The introduction to this paper presented data showing that the employment of disabled people has steadily declined since the 1980s, while rates of benefits receipt have risen. Variation within these broad-strokes patterns supports Marxist theories of disability as demarcating the reserve army of labor. In particular, prior research suggests that employment among disabled people tracks the overall employment rate, but more sharply, with disabled people disproportionately affected by economic downturns (Brown and Ciciurkaite, 2022). Much research shows that disability benefits claims spike during recessions, absorbing many workers expelled from the labor force (Black et al., 2002; Maestas et al., 2021; Mueller et al., 2016). Furthermore, disabled people benefit disproportionately from tight labor markets, such as the market following the COVID-19 pandemic (Ozimek, 2022). As the economist Adam Ozimek summarized in a journalistic investigation of these patterns, ‘We have a last-in, first-out labor market, and disabled people are often among the last in and the first out’ (Casselman, 2022). These fluctuations within the general downward trend in disabled employment suggest that disabled workers fill in gaps in the economy, entering the labor force as needed by capital and exiting when layoffs are profitable.

Furthermore, in the contemporary United States, disabled people who do find work are disproportionately employed in the part-time, temporary, low-wage jobs characteristic of neoliberal restructuring. Across the United States economy, people with disabilities report lower wages (Maroto and Pettinicchio, 2014a, 2014b; Roehrig et al., 2013), less secure employment (Shuey and Jovic, 2013; Yelin and Trupin, 2003), and fewer years in the labor market (Brooks, 2021; Mitchell et al., 2006) than people without disabilities. Within companies, disability correlates with lower wages, job security, training, and participation in workplace decision-making (Schur et al., 2009). Several hundred thousand workers are employed at subminimum wages under a provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act exempting disabled workers from the minimum wage (National Council on Disability, 2018). Ethnographic research links disabled workers’ employment in precarious jobs directly to the contradictions described in this paper, particularly contradictions in the organization of disability benefits (Ruppel, 2023). Disabled people further experience significant occupational segregation, reporting disproportionate employment in office and administrative support, food preparation, and other service occupations, which have expanded rapidly in recent decades (Maroto and Pettinicchio, 2014a). These trends in wages and employment security, and correlations between the overall employment rate and the employment of disabled workers, support the characterization of disabled workers as a reserve army of labor.

In summary, in the United States in recent decades, the employment rates of people with disabilities have fallen while their rates of benefits receipt have risen. However, employment and benefits fluctuate in close connection to broader economic indicators, with disabled workers’ drawn into the labor force when capital demands and pushed out when economic conditions necessitate. Furthermore, people with disabilities are disproportionately employed in low-wage, precarious jobs. This overall trend of diminishing and precarious employment, fluctuating in concert with the needs of capital, corresponds closely to the Marxist characterization of the industrial reserve army. Disability functions to denote this reserve army, in most cases producing labor market exclusion, but maintaining disabled people as ‘wageless life’ (Denning, 2010) who might be drawn into the labor force at any moment. When hired, their employment remains highly contingent, enabling high levels of exploitation and the loss of labor market access if economic conditions decline. These findings clarify the characteristics of the reserve army of labor and the mechanisms constituting disabled people as a reserve army.

Conclusion: Theorizing Disability Under Capitalism

In the contemporary United States, disability is defined by the simultaneous inability to work and symbolic imperative to work. For example, the ‘general foreclosure test’ developed in court interpretations of the ADA requires plaintiffs claiming disability discrimination to show, simultaneously, that their disability is significant enough to foreclose them from most jobs, yet not so significant as to impair their work performance. The ADA and other antidiscrimination legislation symbolically promote the workplace integration of people with disabilities, contributing to an emergent perception that everyone ought to be able to work. However, at a material level, the court interpretation of the ADA has actually undercut the labor force position of disabled workers, legitimizing employers’ unwillingness to finance accommodations or litigation. In the post-ADA world, it is harder than ever for people with disabilities to find work, yet these failures are constructed as individual inadequacies given the supposed protections available. Over the past 40 years, disability benefits have undergone similar transformations, tugging disabled people toward work and away from work at the same time. Policy drift and cyclical backlash against benefits have eroded the livability of benefits and incentivized paid work. Furthermore, legislation such as the TWWIIA engages in the same symbolic project as the ADA, promoting the perception that people with disabilities can easily exit benefits and re-enter the workforce. However, the state failure to adequately finance reforms by extending access to healthcare, technology, and personal assistant services and by raising the earnings and savings caps for benefits recipients prevent the actual attainment of stable, living-wage jobs. Ultimately, these contradictory pressures produce disabled workers as a reserve army of labor malleable to the needs of capital.

This analysis of antidiscrimination legislation and disability benefits addresses the empirical puzzle that this paper opened with. Over the past 40 years, an extensive legislative program has attempted to promote the employment of people with disabilities, yet over this same period employment rates have fallen and rates of benefits receipt have risen. I show that contradictions embedded within this legislative program have undercut the labor market position of people with disabilities. Instead, this legislative program constitutes workers with disabilities as a reserve army of labor. People with disabilities are unemployed at high levels and are incorporated into the workforce on highly precarious terms, subject to high levels of discrimination, the risk of firing if their accommodations prove too expensive, benefits means-testing that incentivizes employment under the table or employment in low-wage work, and significant state oversight if they do attempt to combine benefits with paid work. As a legislative analysis, this paper cannot fully address the consequences of these precarious terms in terms of the actual employment outcomes of people with disabilities. However, other research indeed finds that people with disabilities are employed in lower-wage and more precarious jobs than their nondisabled peers (Brown and Ciciurkaite, 2022; Maroto and Pettinicchio, 2014a; Roehrig et al., 2013; Shuey and Jovic, 2013), and tend to be the last hired and first fired as the economy expands and contracts (Black et al., 2002; Casselman, 2022; Maestas et al., 2021; Mueller et al., 2016; Ozimek, 2022). This trend serves capital by supplying a pool of workers willing to accept the precarious, low-wage jobs characteristic of neoliberal restructuring—just as conservative proponents of the ADA suggested.

This paper clarifies the reserve army concept for future research on disability. I show that ongoing labor market exclusion is crucial to disabled workers’ constitution as a reserve army of labor, contra Russell (1998, 2019) and other Marxist disability theorists writing in the late 20th century, who focus on coercive inclusion. This paper acknowledges a shift in the late 20th century from the complete symbolic exclusion of disabled people from the labor market to partial inclusion, yet it highlights ongoing forms of exclusion rooted in the same legislative regime supposedly promoting inclusion. It thus identifies contradiction as the primary mechanism producing disabled people as a reserve army of labor under neoliberalism. Tensions between symbolic forms of inclusion and material factors driving exclusion constitute disabled people as persistently half-in, half-out of the labor force, drawn in or pushed out as capital requires. In line with the broader contemporary literature on surplus populations (Denning, 2010; Sassen, 2014; Watts, 2011), I show that unemployment—particularly the unemployment of specific marginalized populations, in this instance disabled people—is highly functional for neoliberal capitalism.

This analysis diverges from prior Marxist work on disability in its emphasis on state contradictions. Prior scholarship, particularly the work of Marta Russell (1998, 2019; Russell and Malhotra, 2002), takes an instrumentalist perspective, which presumes a high degree of conscious coordination among state actors. This body of work implies that legislators, state administrators, and capitalists are conspiring to produce workers with disabilities as a reserve army suited to corporations’ hiring needs. By contrast, this paper suggests that this phenomenon emerged from policy drift in disability benefits and as an unanticipated outcome of antidiscrimination legislation. However, I concur with Russell and other Marxist theorists of disability that this outcome is highly functional for capitalism, which inhibits reform efforts. Workers with disabilities fill in gaps in the economy, taking undesirable, low-wage, highly precarious jobs due to their difficulties obtaining other work and their need to limit their earnings in accordance with benefits means-testing. Furthermore, their high rates of unemployment keep down wages and working conditions for all, as nondisabled workers are compelled to remain in low-wage, precarious jobs so as to avoid falling into the industrial reserve army. This paper’s analysis of antidiscrimination and benefits legislation supports Marx’s theory of the reserve army of labor as a key component of capitalist profits, and supports prior conceptualizations of disability as a category demarcating this reserve army.

What alternatives can we envision to this political economic regime? This paper focuses on large-scale legislative transformations over the subjective experiences of disabled workers and their agency in these transformations. To the extent that I address disabled agency, I focus on disability activists’ adoption of conservative lenses in order to negotiate bipartisan compromises such as the ADA, and I argue that these conservative lenses produce contradictions constituting disabled workers as a reserve army of labor. However, a few leftist disability activists advance an alternate politics built in the rejection of work imperatives, though this perspective has not substantially influenced policy. For instance, disability activist and scholar Sunaura Taylor (2004) takes the right not to work as the central stake of disability liberation, writing, ‘Shouldn’t we, of all groups, recognize that it is not work that would liberate us. . . but the right to not work and be proud of it?’ (see also Mitchell and Snyder, 2015). Anti-work disability activists further envision the deprioritization of cost-effectiveness for people with disabilities who do seek work, with accommodations available even when these accommodations offset revenue gains achieved by the hiring of disabled workers, and with the combination of work and benefits encouraged. Taylor—like Russell (1998, 2019) before her—argues against the regime of symbolic inclusion and material exclusion promoted by antidiscrimination and benefits legislation, and for an alternative regime in which material well-being is not dependent on productive capacities.

Disability thus contains the seeds of an expansive anti-work politics. Anti-work politics have flourished since the COVID-19 pandemic, with anti-work activists agitating in the short term for the reduction of the working week and universal basic income, and in the long term for the abolition of capitalism (O’Connor, 2022; Weeks, 2011). The theory presented in this paper of disability and the reserve army of labor may advance these politics. Eradicating wagelessness as the precondition of capitalist accumulation (Denning, 2010) will reduce suffering among the groups currently constituting the reserve army of labor, including people with disabilities. As Magdoff and Magdoff (2004) write,

there would be no surplus of labor if everyone had enough to eat, a decent place to live, health care, and education, and workers had shorter work hours and longer vacations so they could have more leisure and creative time. (pp. 20–21)

Disability specifically serves as an elegant proof of the moral urgency of Marx’s famous dictum, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. Therefore, theorizing the role of disability in the constitution of the reserve army of labor and building upon the anti-work politics developed by disability activists such as Taylor (2004) may help us envision post-capitalist futures.