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This past weekend I participated in another month of an intense developmental disability advocacy course called Partners in Policymaking. For eight months we meet one weekend a month and in two days we have sixteen hours of training. It’s a weekend filled with a lot of information, but I love it.
Our speaker for the weekend was Dr. David Mank, Professor Emeritus and former director of the University of Indiana Institute on Disability and Community. The main topic was sheltered workshops, something I knew a little about going in, but not nearly as much as I thought I did.
Pun fully intended, I was taken to school Friday and Saturday, and learned more than I ever thought I would about these disgusting places in our modern society. As with anything, to understand where we are today, we need to look back to the beginning.
The year was 1938 and Franklin D. Roosevelt was in office. The war was over and hundreds of thousands of disabled veterans were returning home and looking for employment, only to find nothing.
FDR set up the system of sheltered workshops where companies could contract with the workshop to do jobs for them and because the “employees” of the workshop were disabled, it was legal to pay them below minimum wage. After all, they were disabled and not able to do things at the rate a “regular” person could, so why pay them the prevailing wage, right?
In my opinion, WRONG!
Today the system has morphed into workshops where owners get big contracts, pay their workers well below minimum wage and make it so that the worker feels as if they have nowhere else to go, so they stay for years, making the owners rich off their fat contracts.
What kind of work do people in sheltered workshops do today? Well, a good example would be the bags of screws, nuts or bolts that we see on the shelves of our local hardware stores. The people who work at the sheltered workshops count out the number of pieces that are supposed to go in the bag, put them in the bag and then do it again.
Here’s how the math works at a sheltered workshop. Keep in mind that these numbers are best-case scenarios, as we saw a presentation listing several states and what the average worker made. One state was as low as .02 cents per hour. That’s not a typo.
Ten-year-olds in overseas sweatshops make more money than a lot of the people in sheltered workshops across the United States.
Back to the math. Let’s use $10 an hour as our minimum wage for easy calculations. If a “regular” person in a non-workshop environment can produce 100 bags of screws per hour, that is set as the normal workload. If a person in a workshop can produce 20 bags in an hour, that’s 20% of the workload and they can legally be paid 20% of that prevailing wage, in this case, $2 per hour.
Now, remember I said that this is a best-case scenario as many people are paid significantly less than that.
Notice I keep using the word “people” and not the phrase, “person with a disability.” That’s because these are people, regardless of whether or not they have a disability and making a legal sub-minimum wage has to make them feel like less of a person.
Yes, many are thrilled just to have jobs, but the point of these sheltered workshops was to teach people with a disability a skill and then get them out into the workforce where they could use that skill to earn a competitive wage.
What it is today is a system where people stay and feel that they can never leave (probably because they don’t feel like a real worker) and so they stay and help the owners line their pockets with the money from the contracts.
Several states have shuttered the doors on sheltered workshops altogether and a small handful more are on that path, but in the overwhelming majority of states, it’s completely legal for these businesses to operate and to pay their workers whatever they feel is right.
Before tax paychecks of $50 or less for a 25-hour work week are commonplace, and in my mind absolutely disgusting. How are people supposed to feel good about themselves and to be in a place to go out and look for a job in the workforce if they’re made to believe this is all they are worth?
Do sheltered workshops serve a purpose? If done correctly, absolutely. But you would spend a lot of time looking at workshops before you found even one that was in it to serve the original purpose of training someone and then helping them move into the workforce.
This is a controversial subject in the disability community and I’m very sure you have an opinion one way or another on what you just read. Share that opinion in the comments section below and let’s start a conversation about the practice of legally paying American workers sub-minimum wage.
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