Brain Injury Lawyer

In representing people with work disabilities and impairments, I have come to recognize and realize that people with work disabilities will earn less money over their work life and will work for a shorter period of time over their work life due to these disabilities. I have just received and read the revised 2006 New Work Life Expectancy Tables prepared by Anthony Gamboa, Jr., Ph.D. and David S. Gibson, MBA, CPA from Vocational Econometrics Incorporated. The new revised tables are broken down by gender, level of educational attainment and level of disability.

As set forth in the preface to these new tables, these tables "address one of the two impacts for persons with a disability: they experience, on average, a reduction in work life expectancy. In addition, the more severe the disability, the greater the effect on reducing unemployment."

According to the authors, the work life expectancy data are specific to persons defined as severely disabled, disabled, and not severely disabled as defined by the US Census Bureaus current population survey.

Most exciting is that the tables, for the first time are specific to persons with functional limitations. This data is now derived from estimates emanating from the US Census Bureaus 2001 - 2004 America Community Survey, a MAT gross survey designed to replace the long form of the Decennial Census.

The important thing is that everyone who represents people with disabilities should become familiar with these work life expectancies. Even where an individual is back to work following a disability, it is important to recognize that that person on average, will earn less money per year and will lose more time in the workplace than someone without a work disability and may ultimately be forced to retire earlier.