Issue 009: The Access Gap

Less than a quarter of disabled adults in the US have a job. Two in three non-disabled adults do. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the actual numbers on it in March 2026: a 22.8% employment rate for people with disabilities against 65.2% for people without one, a 42-point gap that barely moved even in a year when unemployment stayed low everywhere else. That isn't a talent shortage. It's what happens when hiring processes, interview formats, and everyday workplace tools get built for one kind of candidate by default, and everyone else gets filed under "accommodation."

This week is about the employers who rebuilt the default instead of bolting an exception onto it, the hiring software already facing a federal court over doing the opposite at scale, and a regulator that just started handing out real fines for accessibility failures instead of warning letters. Three frameworks for people leaders who want to know whether their own hiring process is closing that gap or quietly holding it in place.

A scheduling mix-up on our side means there's no Leader Spotlight and no TWL Live this week, nothing to do with any guest, normal service resumes next week. In its place, a story that broke this week and is worth every people leader's attention: the CEO who became infamous for firing 900 employees over a three-minute Zoom call just got fired himself, by his own board, for reasons that will sound familiar.

Welcome to the ninth issue of The Work Life Reporter. This week you get:

Let’s get into it.

In 2002, Walgreens vice president Randy Lewis, whose son is autistic, set out to prove that "talent" and "disability" weren't opposites at a company that ran on physical, high-volume distribution work. The model he built ran on one rule: the same standards, the same work, the same pay, and the same performance measures for every employee, with training redesigned around visual iconography instead of dense text manuals. Two decades on, Walgreens' distribution centre in Windsor, Connecticut runs with 46% of its workforce having a disability. Its Anderson, South Carolina centre runs at 38%. The approach later moved into retail stores too, starting in Dallas-Fort Worth in 2010: 500 candidates with disabilities have gone through the programme, 66% of them successfully trained and placed across 100 stores in 16 markets.

The mechanism here isn't charity and it isn't a lowered bar. It's a redesigned path to the same bar. Walgreens didn't decide disabled employees needed different performance standards, it decided its training had been unnecessarily dependent on one specific way of learning a job, and that dependency was the actual barrier. The result: retention rates roughly double the non-disabled employee population, and lower absenteeism. At least 100 other companies have since toured Walgreens' distribution centres to study how they did it.

Derek Mobley says he was rejected from more than 100 jobs by employers using Workday's applicant screening tools, and instead of challenging any single employer's decision, he sued Workday itself. In July 2024, Judge Rita Lin ruled that Workday could be treated as an agent performing core hiring functions on behalf of its employer clients, making it directly liable under Title VII, the ADEA, and the ADA, not just a neutral software vendor. In May 2025, age discrimination claims were certified as a collective action covering hiring decisions back to 2020. On 22 June 2026, the court allowed disability discrimination and California FEHA claims to proceed too, widening the case across every protected category Mobley originally raised. The claims center on a specific mechanism: algorithms trained on historical hiring data that penalise things like employment gaps, patterns that correlate with age, disability, and other protected characteristics without ever mentioning them directly.

This isn't really a story about one vendor. Workday's tools sit inside the hiring process of thousands of employers who never individually chose the exact rejection logic now being tested in a Northern District of California courtroom, they adopted a platform and inherited whatever pattern it learned. Most HR leaders using an applicant tracking or AI screening layer could not tell you, today, which data points are actually driving who gets filtered out before a human ever opens their CV. A decision your organisation can't explain is still a decision your organisation is legally responsible for.

JPMorgan's Autism at Work programme started as a small pilot with a handful of Delaware employees in 2015. It now spans more than 40 roles across nine countries, backed by an internal playbook on recruiting and interviewing neurodivergent candidates and instructor-led training available in five languages, so hiring and supporting these candidates isn't confined to one specialist team. The redesign replaced the standard unstructured interview, the kind that reads eye contact and easy small talk as proxies for confidence and competence, with skills-based tasks that produce direct evidence of the actual work.

The clearest proof it worked: in January 2022, three autistic employees formed what the company calls its Crypto Explorers Think Tank and produced forecasts on how crypto market scenarios would play out. According to JPMorgan, those forecasts came true almost exactly as predicted. That's not an inspiring anecdote to file under DEI, it's a direct return on a process change most companies never make: when the standard interview format is itself the barrier, redesigning it doesn't just tick a compliance box, it surfaces people whose way of thinking your old funnel was filtering out by design, not by accident.

In April 2023, Lloyds Banking Group became the first UK financial services company to publicly commit to a representation target for disabled colleagues in senior roles, aiming for 12%. It hit 19% by the end of 2025. That target didn't move on its own. Between March 2023 and the end of 2025, the share of colleagues willing to share their disability data with the company rose from 24.7% to 66.7%, with an 80% goal set for 2026. Its "This is Me" training, launched in September 2024, has now been completed by more than 47,000 colleagues, covering immersive leadership sessions, manager workshops, and accessible formats including BSL interpretation and text-reading tools. In 2022, Lloyds became the first UK bank to open a Changing Places accessible facility; it now runs eight. It has also built accessibility into its actual products and services, partnering with Signly for British Sign Language website translation, integrating the Recite Me accessibility tool, and working with the Royal National Institute of Blind People on accessible formats.

The leadership number moved faster than planned not because the target itself was motivating, but because the infrastructure around it, training, physical accessibility, disclosure culture, digital tools, made disclosing a disability safer and progressing afterward more realistic. The representation figure is a lagging indicator of that work, not the driver of it.

The European Accessibility Act has carried real compliance obligations since June 2025. By the reporting deadlines that followed, four of France's largest grocery retailers, Auchan, Carrefour, E.Leclerc, and Picard Surgelés, hadn't met the requirements for their digital services. Disability organisations didn't wait for a regulator, they filed for interim relief in a French Commercial Court in November 2025, and the legal action is still ongoing. In Norway, the medical app HelsaMi, used by an estimated 500,000 people, missed its correction deadline entirely and is now facing a compulsory fine of roughly 50,000 kroner, about $5,360, for every single day it stays non-compliant.

For years, digital accessibility sat in the same bucket as most values statements: real on paper, rarely enforced with anything more than a strongly worded letter. 2026 is the year that changed across parts of Europe. Not a warning, a daily compounding fine and a court filing. The cost of an inaccessible careers page, booking form, or app used to live quietly in a policy document nobody reread. In at least two countries now, it lives on a running total that keeps growing until someone actually fixes it.

Most companies process each accommodation request as its own isolated case: a form, an approval, a line manager quietly figuring it out. What almost nobody does is look at the pattern across requests the way they'd look at attrition or engagement data. Which teams generate the most requests. How long approval actually takes against the policy promise. Which requests get quietly discouraged before they're ever formally logged.

That gap matters given what's at stake. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the 2025 disability employment-population ratio at 22.8%, against 65.2% for people without a disability, a 42-point gap that held steady through a year when most other labour market measures barely moved. A gap that stable isn't random. It's the compounding output of thousands of individual hiring and workplace decisions that, in aggregate, keep landing in the same place.

Treat accommodation-request themes and approval timelines as a quarterly metric, reviewed the same way you'd review attrition by team. If one function is quietly slower or stingier than the rest, that's not an admin issue for HR to tidy up. That's the same 42-point gap, happening inside your own building, one unread data point at a time.

Most companies find out their application process is inaccessible from a lawsuit or a rejected candidate who never explains why, not from an internal audit. It's one of the easiest gaps to close and one of the least checked, because the page loads fine and the form submits fine, for the person testing it with a mouse and full vision.

The test costs nothing and takes twenty minutes. Unplug your mouse. Try to complete your own job application using only a keyboard and, if you can, a free screen reader. Notice exactly where you get stuck: a button with no label, a multi-step form that loses your progress, a CAPTCHA with no audio alternative. Every one of those is a candidate you're currently losing without ever knowing they applied.

This isn't a future compliance project to schedule for next quarter. It's a live filter running on your hiring funnel right now, deciding who reaches a human before anyone on your team has opened a single CV.

Most companies run the same interview funnel for every role and then wonder, year after year, why they keep hiring the same kind of person. Change what "competent" is allowed to look like inside that funnel, and you don't just tick a compliance box, you find people who were competent the whole time and invisible to your old process.

JPMorgan's neurodivergent hiring programme is the clearest recent proof of this. A think tank of three autistic employees, brought in through a redesigned, skills-based process rather than a standard interview, produced crypto market forecasts that reportedly played out almost exactly as predicted. That's not an inspiring anecdote, it's a direct return on a process change most companies never bother making.

Pick one role this quarter. Pilot a skills-based, non-interview-format assessment for it instead of the standard panel. See who applies, and who clears the bar, that never would have under your old format.

In December 2021, Better.com founder and CEO Vishal Garg summoned roughly 900 employees, 15% of the company, onto an abruptly scheduled Zoom call and told them, in one line that would follow him for years: "If you're on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off. Your employment here is terminated effective immediately." It became one of the most widely covered examples of bad leadership behaviour in modern corporate history, replayed and dissected across business media for years afterward. Garg apologised publicly within days and, for a while, kept his job.

This week, five years on, his own board took it from him. Better Home & Finance (the company Better.com became after a 2023 SPAC listing) announced on 3 August 2026 that Garg was stepping down as CEO, replaced by Daniel Lewis, a former hedge fund manager who'd joined the board just a week earlier. The board's stated reasons, laid out in filings and public statements, were concerns about Garg's "judgment, temperament, and credibility." The numbers behind that language: more than $1.5 billion in cumulative losses since 2022, a stock down over 90% under his leadership, and eleven consecutive quarters of losses. The board also alleged Garg had delayed a required quarterly filing by refusing to sign representation letters on time, and that some of his communications "evidence conduct that counsel believes may constitute violations of U.S. securities laws."

Garg isn't going quietly. As of this week, he says he's secured shareholder declarations representing a voting majority, called for five board members to resign, and offered to work for $1 a year until the company turns profitable while personally repurchasing $30 million of stock. His response to the board: he grew revenue 2.5x over two years and cut monthly losses from over $40 million to around $4 million, and the company is "nearly at the light at the end of the tunnel." The board's response to him: it "will not be bullied into actions that they do not believe serve shareholder interests."

This is a live, unresolved situation as this issue goes out, worth watching over the coming weeks.

And that's a wrap for Issue 009. Something land? Hit reply and tell us which section you're taking back to your team.

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