Disability Employment In Wyoming Is Top Ten In The Country

Wyoming came in tenth in the country for employing people with disabilities.

Just a little over 45% of people with disabilities in Wyoming are working on a daily basis.  There are 578 jobs that Wyoming offers for people with disabilities.  The United States has over 20 million working-age people with disabilities who have a job, Wyoming has a total of 40,000 working-age people with disabilities who are employed.

Even though Wyoming does very well at employing people with disabilities, the problem is those people are paid less and even get fewer hours at work because of their disabilities.

"For a lot of people with disabilities, they may be counted as having employment, but they may only make $15,000 a year. And that's not a living wage," Eric Moody, Director of research and Evaluation at the Wyoming Institute for Disabilities at the University of Wyoming told Wyoming Public Media. "That's not enough to live on, to have a home, do what you need to do to set up your retirement or take care of a family. That's extremely common and pervasive throughout all of these states as well."

Another one of the problems is once these people do get a job they can only work so much because then they won't get assistance from programming that works with people with disabilities.

Employers seem to worry about hiring people with disabilities, but Moody assures you that you won't regret it.

"People with disabilities can be really, really good employees...They tend to have very low turnover. They tend to not take as much days off as you would expect. And they can really work within the business environment, and they can help businesses grow" Moody tells Wyoming Public Media.