Study: Workers with disabilities paid 10% less

• Cornell research shows persistent pay gap
• Workers with disabilities more likely to take manual labor than white-collar jobs
• Less than 25%25 of people with disabilities are in the labor force

WASHINGTON — Workers with disabilities are paid about 10% less than other workers in similar jobs, and 8% less in total compensation, including wages, health insurance and vacation time, according to a new Cornell University study.

Research by Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations found that people with disabilities are more likely to opt for jobs that pay lower wages but offer strong benefit packages.

"So you might imagine someone taking a job for $40,000 with health insurance or a job for $60,000 without health insurance," Kevin Hallock, director of the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell, said during a presentation at a conference on disability employment Wednesday in Arlington, Va.

Workers with disabilities also are overrepresented in manual labor jobs and underrepresented in white-collar fields. The study found transportation, production, and office and administrative support were among the top occupations where people with disabilities were employed.

Skilled jobs, including management, business and finance occupations, employed the lowest number of people with disabilities.

The Cornell research has some limitations: Only full-time male workers were surveyed to determine wage gaps because researchers wanted to isolate a similar group of individuals without introducing other variables such as gender.

Adriana Kugler, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, said at a panel discussion during the conference, "It is very, very key that we (also) focus on this other gap, which is the unemployment gap."

Only 21% of people with disabilities are either employed or actively looking for a job. Among those seeking work, the jobless rate was 13% in September 2013 compared to just over 7% for those without disabilities.

Some proposed solutions to cut the wage gap for disabled workers include more efforts by employers to raise awareness, improve management training and expand services and programs to accommodate employees with disabilities. Companies also should do a better job of measuring wage gaps involving their disabled employees, the researchers said.

"Employers need to be looking at wage gaps in their own workforce," said Linda Barrington, executive director of Cornell's Institute for Compensation Studies. "A lot of companies do that for gender, they do that for race, ethnicity. People with disabilities — and (the) pay gap for people with disabilities need to be included in every company's checklist as they go through and say 'do we have fair pay practices.'"