Top Democrats Differ On Ending Subminimum Wage For Workers With Disabilities

[broadzilla]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14...abilities/

This is inhumane!
Next time you complain that you are paid too little, think of someone who is trying to make a life for themselves on less than $2.00 per hour.
Our representatives are keeping these individuals dependent on the government by not forcing Goodwill and others to pay a fair wage.

BY MIKE ELK

Democratic Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin (speaking here in December in defense of Medicaid) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif) announced last week a proposal to increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10. But will people with disabilities be left out? (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Barack Obama called for increasing the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour. On Tuesday, Congressional Democrats did him one better, unveiling a plan to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, as well as raise the subminimum wage for tipped workers from $2.13 an hour to 70 percent of the minimum wage.

Their proposal, however, would not cover the 420,000 Americans with disabilities who are currently paid a subminimum wage of as little as a few cents per hour in some state-sponsored "sheltered workshops," such as Goodwill. These programs, licensed under provision 14c of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, are intended to be for training, but many workers wind up as perpetual “trainees,” employed in sheltered workshops for years earning subminimium wage rates; thus becoming stuck in a cycle of poverty. While advocates have repeatedly tried to address this issue divides within both the Democratic Party and the disability community have so far prevented these laws from being sensibly revised.

Many advocates for the disabled have called for the 14c provision to be eliminated, suggesting that having Americans with disabilities work in sheltered workplaces often run by nonprofits or the state can cause as many problems as it solves.

“There are two big problems," says Barb Trader, executive director of TASH, an international advocacy group for persons with disabilities. "One is that they are segregated from society forever when they are in a sheltered workshop. The rest of us make friends and colleagues through our work. Work really defines so much of who we are. The other problem is lifelong poverty because there is no way these people are going to be able to achieve any type of sufficiency economically.”

In addition to the segregation and poverty engendered by sheltered workplaces, many advocates say workers with disabilities often face exploitation. In 2009, Iowa shut down a “bunkhouse”--essentially, a shed--where 60 men with disabilities employed by the meat processor Henry Turkey Services were forced to sleep. The bunkhouse was unheated, poorly insulated and infested with cockroaches. The company deducted $10,000 a week from the paychecks of the workers housed in the bunkhouse.

Aside from the deplorable housing conditions, the 60 workers with disabilities were paid only $0.41 an hour to work alongside abled workers who were earning between $9 and $12 an hour. Since workers with disabilities are often employed in jobs that would normally pay minimum wage, many in organized labor have called for the subminimum wages for workers with disabilities to be repealed.

“Over 100,000 SEIU members support people with disabilities so they can live fulfilling lives as part of their communities," says SEIU spokesperson Arvil Smith. "We believe the well-being of workers and the people our members support are inextricably linked. These values inform SEIU members’ commitment to ending wage discrimination against workers with disabilities. Equal pay for equal work is a matter of basic fairness. That means no person with a disability who wishes to work should be denied the assistance they need to secure employment in the general workforce at minimum wage or higher.”

In addition to labor unions and some disability groups, the independent federal agency the National Council on Disability (NCD) has called for phasing out the 14c exemption of the minimum wage law.

“In 2010, statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that nearly 28 percent of Americans with disabilities aged 18 to 64 live in poverty,” read a statement by the NCD released after President Obama’s State of the Union address. “Today, hundreds of thousands of Americans with disabilities earn less than minimum wage under a little-known relic of employment policy that assumed people with disabilities were not capable of meaningful, competitive employment."

Despite this opposition, closing the loophole for workers with disabilities does not appear to be on the table in talks about raising the minimum wage. The tension was on display Tuesday when Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP) committee, and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), senior Democratic member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, introduced their bill to increase the minimum wage. Asked whether the exemption for people with disabilities should be repealed, Rep. Miller said, “We should expect that to be part of this debate. It always is." He added that he agreed with the NCD's stance.

Sen. Harkin, however, does not agree. “Philosophically, Sen. Harkin would prefer that no person be paid less than minimum wage under any circumstances, but he has heard from a number of advocates for people with disabilities that eliminating the subminimum wage option without having a real plan to create sustainable employment alternatives would be detrimental to Americans with disabilities currently working in 14© settings,” wrote Allison Preiss, spokesperson for Sen. Harkin, in an email to Working In These Times following the Tuesday announcement. “Sen. Harkin is trying to change the subminimum wage program so that young people are not tracked into subminimum wage jobs without having a chance to experience competitive, integrated employment; and he’s working to promote upward mobility for people in those programs.”

One of the disability advocates opposed to the change is Bobby Silverstein, Harkin’s former top disability staffer. Silverstein now works as a lobbyist for ACCSES, a coalition of nonprofit groups that employ disabled workers.

“Would you hire somebody who is working at 30 percent and not meeting productivity goals?" Silverstein asks rhetorically. "What if somebody is not capable with or without an accommodation of working at a regular job? Should we force them into a rehabilitation program with no work or sit at home and watch TV? If you eliminated 14c, you would lose the opportunity for these people to be trained to be employed.”

But other advocates say that there is little evidence that 14c-sheltered workplaces actually help workers with disabilities obtain jobs with standard wages. A 2001 study by the federal General Accountability Office (GAO) found that only 5 percent of workers employed in 14c-sheltered workplace programs left to take regular “integrated employment” jobs. They often point to Vermont, which eliminated 14c-sheltered workplace programs in 2003 and focused instead on providing wrap-around transition and job coaching services to disabled people and their employers so they could maintain regular jobs. Today, 40 percent of Vermonters with disabilities are employed in “integrated employment” jobs, compared to only 20 percent of workers with disabilities nationwide.

Disability advocates say that the real reason why groups like ACCSES support maintaining the 14c exemption is that they benefit financially from it. For instance, the CEO of Goodwill, one of the biggest employers of people with disabilities, makes more than $500,000 each year while some blind Goodwill workers are paid only $1.44 an hour.

“I think it has a lot to do with money," says Trader. "For ACCSES, it is about their business strategy. There is not an argument in the research or among the self-advocacy community for continuing the 14c program. People with disabilities are saying close those things down and divert the money into more productive ways of supporting people in getting real jobs."

[PonderThis]

All that would result from this is disabled workers won't have jobs to go to. Nobody in a free market is going to pay a worker that produces at the 30% level the same wages as more able people make.

[broadzilla]

U.S. Department of Justice accuses Oregon of segregating disabled in sheltered workshops

Oregon unlawfully segregates people with disabilities in sheltered workshops instead of providing them more work opportunities in the public midst, federal authorities allege.

In a news conference Monday, officials with the U.S. Justice Department said they have joined a class-action lawsuit filed by people with disabilities against Gov. John Kitzhaber and the state of Oregon last year, demanding changes to the sheltered workshop system.

As recently as the 1990s, Oregon was a national leader in providing workplace supports for citizens with significant developmental and intellectual disabilities, allowing them to join the general workforce. But the number of people toiling in the workshops has more than doubled since then to 2,600, according to the Justice Department.

Sixty-one percent of those disabled Oregonians now labor in sheltered workshops, often earning less than minimum wage, while just 16 percent are employed at businesses with integrated workforces, said Eve Hill, a senior counselor to the assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights. The percentage of those employed outside workshops has dropped nearly in half in roughly a decade.

Justice Department officials began in October 2011 to investigate those disparities as evidence of violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, better known as the ADA.

Read more
The Oregonian's groundbreaking series on sheltered workshop programs in Oregon and nationally, published in 2006 and 2007.
Then in January 2012, Disability Rights Oregon and the Center for Public Representation, along with two private law firms, brought suit on behalf of eight people with disabilities and United Cerebral Palsy of Oregon and Southwest Washington.

"We know we can do much better," said Amanda Marshall, the U.S. attorney for Oregon, during an afternoon news conference in Portland to announce that the U.S. government was intervening as a plaintiff in Lane v. Kitzhaber.

Erinn Kelley-Siel, director of the Oregon Department of Human Services, noted the state's disappointment that the U.S. Department of Justice filed what amounts to a first-of-a-kind lawsuit.

"To the best of our knowledge, no other state has been sued on the grounds that sheltered workshops themselves are violations of the ADA," she wrote. "During the past year, Oregon has made significant and time-intensive efforts to settle this matter through numerous meetings and communications with (the Justice Department), and Oregon continues to believe that these issues should be resolved through negotiation and not in court."

Kelley-Siel noted that the state continues to work to ensure what she described as a "balanced and reasonable implementation of employment policies" for workers with intellectual and developmental disabilities, "while respecting consumer and family choice."

Charity officials who run sheltered workshops often say that workers and their families prefer them to labor in warehouses that provide a safe, nurturing environment.

The lawsuit challenges what it describes as Oregon's failure to give enough people with disabilities the chance to work in the general workforce, rather than relegating them to sheltered workshops. Those workshops, set up in warehouses across the state, most often amount to dead-end jobs that typically pay piece-rate wages that amount to less than the federal minimum wage, critics say.

Federal law allows employers to pay people with disabilities what is known as sub-minimum wage. Records show that many Americans who fall into that category earn less than $1 an hour.

Lane v. Kitzhaber was so named because it pits Paula Lane, who earned as little as 40 cents an hour in a sheltered workshop in Beaverton, against Gov. John Kitzhaber as Oregon's chief executive. The lawsuit aims to provide workshop laborers such as Lane, who has multiple disabilities including autism, with job coaches and other professional supports so that they can work at regular jobs in the public midst, said Bob Joondeph, executive director of Disability Rights Oregon.

As it stands, he said, the majority of working Oregonians with serious disabilities find themselves segregated into workshop settings. They often toil in jobs for nonprofits that pay poorly and sometimes give participants practice work when there are no jobs for them to do.

Oregon has not developed adequate services to offer people a chance to work outside the workshops, Joondeph said.

"A person cannot choose to use a service," he said, "that is not made available to them."
-- Bryan Denson

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index...accus.html

Oregon is breaking federal laws!

[PonderThis]

I thought you generally preach freedom from regulation. How do you propose providing job coaches, integrating disabled workers and paying minimum wages too, all without this amounting to an immense subsidy that's forced on businesses? This seems like it goes against almost every economic post you have ever made, but suddenly it's somehow different with disabled people?

Indeed, what you are advocating seems like a form of communism, or socialism.

Not that I'm against that, either. It only doesn't mesh with the majority of your posts here.

[broadzilla]

Do I really? Don't think so.
I have never said I am against governmental programs designed to help people.
I just happen to have friends that are against them.

[broadzilla]

You'd be amazed at some of the workers they have through the sheltered workshops. Some of them have a far more enthusiastic and well-mannered work ethic than most of the "mainstream" workers I come into contact with.

Let them have the service jobs, i.e. McD's, BK, Wendy's, janitorial, housekeeping, etc., and get rid of the lackadaisical people we have doing some of those jobs now.

I have been to other cities where people with disabilities are working these jobs, where you see them every day...not here, they shut them away in factory-like places and use them like slave-labor while the directors make hundreds-of-thousands of dollars each year and pat themselves on the back for being do-gooders (which they are not).

To top it off these programs, which are meant to train workers so they can get mainstream jobs, do not do what they are set up to do. I have personal experience with this. They don't get them jobs in the mainstream, they want to keep their slaves...especially the ones who are excellent producers.

We are talking not only about those with severe disabilities, but those who are higher functioning (i.e. Aspies).

[PonderThis]

Most of the unemployable people I know gravitate towards self employment of some sort. Myself included.

[broadzilla]

How do you propose providing job coaches, integrating disabled workers and paying minimum wages too, all without this amounting to an immense subsidy that's forced on businesses?

Thing is...all this is already in place through agencies like the workshops and Voc. Rehab., but they don't try very hard to get these people mainstream employment. They would rather hand them off to Goodwill who pays them slave wages and works them in ugly conditions...think sweat shops. (Yes, I do know this for a fact...personal experience.)

They have job coaches...and they are a complete joke. I don't know how much government money is wrapped up in these programs, but the feds are a bit pissed off that Oregon isn't utilizing the federal funds the way they are supposed to.

...and I'm not all that impressed either.

[broadzilla]

Most of the unemployable people I know gravitate towards self employment of some sort. Myself included.

I totally get that.

I know my daughter will be employable (heck, at 13 she already is)...but there are so many out there that already are and are being treated like cattle it infuriates me. Those that don't have family/friends to advocate for them are stuck.

[illcommandante]

This is why Karl Karcher is in Hell. And, why Mom, for shenanigans pulled at SPARC, will join him. Need a thirty thousand dollar riding lawnmower? You do, if you want one at all. And, you buy it where you are sent. The disabled are grant fodder, in Grants Pass.