Tens of thousands of people with severe disabilities enjoy productive jobs thanks to an array of public assistance, nonprofit charity, and federal labor laws.
Vice President Kamala Harris has pledged to outlaw those jobs, and the Washington Post has launched a campaign against them. President Joe Biden’s Labor Department is planning to introduce new rules this month altering the program.
The contention is over a federal law that creates a special minimum wage for disabled workers in extreme circumstances. Most of these workers, who generally could not perform in an ordinary workplace, are employed in workshops run by nonprofit groups, performing simple tasks and being paid a piece rate for their work rather than an hourly wage.
The resulting wage is generally below the federal minimum wage, but these jobs aren’t supposed to provide anyone with a living — the recipients all receive Medicaid and many other public benefits. The primary value of these special jobs is providing purpose, skills, camaraderie, and a small sense of independence for adults whose severe disabilities make it impossible for them to live fully self-sufficient lives and hold on to competitive jobs for the standard employer.
Nevertheless, these programs are under fire from disability groups and labor unions: the Service Employees International Union, a massive Democratic-aligned labor union, has been lobbying since the Obama administration to eliminate them. Just this month, the Washington Post began an assault on the program.
The Democrats and the Washington Post’s campaign against this program is baffling to those in the trenches. “I honestly and truly have no idea why they are trying to do this,” said David Ordan, CEO of the IKE Center, a Milwaukee nonprofit group that runs a bakeshop making dog treats and is staffed by adults with severe disabilities. “I cannot figure out the logic behind it.”
On the surface, this is a policy disagreement over the best way to help the severely disabled. On a deeper level, though, this reflects philosophical differences about the inherent value of work and the nature of fairness. It also tells a story about special interest lobbying in Washington and undermines the Left’s claims to be the champions of the most needy.
Special wages
Section 14(c) of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fair Labor Standards Act created this system of special jobs for the severely disabled. Employers of the severely disabled can apply for a certificate that exempts them from ordinary minimum-wage laws and creates a special minimum wage for workers engaged in certain jobs.
The special minimum wage applies to piece-work jobs, such as sorting and packaging items for shipment, and there are strict and detailed rules dictating these wages.
Employers must first determine the rate at which an experienced able-bodied worker would execute a task — say, filling a box with dog treats and sealing it.
Then, the workshop must determine the prevailing wage, which is far higher than the minimum wage, in its area. If the experienced worker can package 100 boxes of dog treats in an hour, including a 10-minute break, and the prevailing wage is $15 an hour, then the piece rate would be 15 cents per box ($15.00 divided by 100 boxes).
The Washington Post attacks this arrangement this way: “Tens of thousands of disabled people in United States are paid less than the federal minimum wage — with some workers making as little as 25 cents per hour.”
This framing is intended to imply that employers are exploiting the disabled. “How is this happening in 2024,” a liberal civil rights lawyer cried on X, “and why isn’t this at top of list of policies to halt yesterday?”
The answer to “how is this happening?” is not complicated: There exist tens of thousands of adults whose disabilities preclude them from holding competitive jobs in integrated workplaces. The 14(c) law allows nonprofit groups to pay them for their work as part of a broader network of support.
Lisa Liston is the special services coordinator at Clelian Heights, a Catholic institution for disabled adults. Her daughter Sarah works in a 14(c) program. “Quite honestly, the money is not what’s important to Sarah and to most of the folks down there,” Liston said. “It’s the pride. It’s the time with friends.”
Critics, though, argue that everyone in a 14(c) workshop should be sent out into the competitive workforce. Many workers do graduate from 14(c) workshops into what is called “competitive integrated employment,” and tens of thousands of disabled workers have found market-rate jobs in ordinary workplaces. But for others, that’s simply not a possibility.
Sarah Liston, for instance, has autism, suffers from migraines, and requires 24-hour assistance. She clearly benefits form her workshop job and simply could not hold down a competitive $8-an-hour job in a competitive integrated workplace.
“People that have been here a very long time have been here a very long time for a reason,” said Colleen Stuart, who runs the Venango Training and Development Center in Seneca, Pennsylvania. Stuart is leading the fight to save 14(c), heading the Coalition for the Preservation of Employment Choice.
The workshops are often integrated with the workers’ housing, which is valuable. Many of the workers require extraordinary assistance, such as help using the bathroom and help being fed, Ordan and Stuart explained. “They can’t really work in the community without massive support,” Ordan said.
Shutting them down
When Harris’s presidential campaign finally announced some policies on her homepage, one of her first promises was to “end sub-minimum wages for tipped workers and people with disabilities.”
This would shut down these workshops by outlawing tens of thousands of jobs. The people who run the workshops say this would leave most of their disabled workers without any work.
Stuart said she once had to shut down a workshop in rural Pennsylvania, and the result was devastating. Out of the approximately 30 men and women who had been employed there, Stuart said only one person was able to land a job after it closed.
“There are some that have no services because there aren’t agencies that can go that far out into the rural area to serve them. So they’re at home, decompensating,” Stuart said. The others “are in programs that they don’t really want to be in,” such as basic rehab programs. “It’s not what they want. They wanted to come and work.”
Nevertheless, the major disability lobbies in Washington, D.C., support abolishing 14(c) jobs, arguing that the laid-off disabled workers will find competitive integrated employment. There is nothing currently stopping these workers from finding such work, especially in today’s relatively tight labor market. It’s an unrealistic and ungrounded assumption.
This is not merely a disagreement over the labor-market prospects of nonverbal adults with severe autism. It’s also a lobbying war between competing interests.
Eliminating workshops might increase wages for other workers, in part by eliminating competition. It’s also worth noting that the disability advocates quoted by the press and who appear before Congress have far milder disabilities than Sarah Liston or the typical worker at the IKE Center or Clelian Heights.
The more severely disabled, many of whom are nonverbal, cannot lobby for themselves on Capitol Hill, in state legislatures, or in the pages of the Washington Post.
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And this demonstrates the clientism of Democratic politics: Rather than governing from principles and a notion of the common good, today’s Democratic Party is a coalition of special-interest groups. These groups support Democrats electorally, and Democrats support them with favorable legislation.
Democrat get away with claiming to be helping the vulnerable and needy, but only because they can safely ignore the most vulnerable and needy, who lack political power.