Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities
Blog
Date:
Wednesday,
April 3, 2013
From the 2012 Annual Report of the National Federation of the Blind
The
National Federation of the Blind is, at its core, a grassroots civil rights
movement consisting of blind people, our family members, and friends. Our
movement is founded on the principles of equality and full participation of
blind people in every aspect of society. Although we have made significant
strides toward achieving equality of opportunity, many barriers to our full
participation as American citizens continue to exist. Most notable are the
barriers that blind people face in our efforts to obtain competitive, integrated
employment. Although laws prohibiting discrimination against people with
disabilities in employment are in place, ignorance about the true employment
capacity of the blind, lack of awareness about assistive work technologies among
employers, the deficiency of proper educational and training opportunities for
blind workers, and the overwhelmingly low vocational expectations for the blind
held by society all contribute to an unemployment rate of over 70 percent for
working age blind adults. Members of the NFB accept the responsibility and
welcome the opportunity to play a part in developing strategies to address all
of these issues effectively, but our ability to be successful is significantly
hindered when we are denied the same fundamental rights as every other American
citizen.
In
1938, policymakers, acting on a laudable but misdirected desire to integrate
people with disabilities into the workforce, implemented Section 14(c) of the
Fair Labor Standards Act, a provision that authorizes the U.S. Department of
Labor to issue Special Wage Certificates to employers, permitting them to pay
workers with disabilities less than the federal minimum wage. As a result of the
erroneous belief, commonly held in 1938 but long since disproved, that people
with disabilities cannot be productive employees, employers are permitted to pay
workers with disabilities subminimum wages that are supposedly based on their
productivity. This denial of fundamental wage protections to workers with
disabilities, although masked as a compassionate offering of a work opportunity
that would otherwise not be available, leaves over 300,000 people with
disabilities employed at subminimum wages, some as low as three cents per hour.
Members
of the National Federation of the Blind are faced with over seventy years of
institutionalized thinking that people with disabilities lack the ability to
fully participate in the workplace, and we fight every day to demonstrate to the
world that blind people have capacity. Because we have dared to believe in
ourselves, today there are blind lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, members
of the clergy, automobile mechanics, computer programmers, farmers, and more.
The truth is that there are any number of jobs that match the unique skills,
talents, interests and abilities of people with even the most significant
disabilities. Moreover, assistive technology exists that allows people with
disabilities to perform job tasks with the quality and efficiency of
non-disabled employees. Although the diversity of jobs and the availability of
assistive technology have made it possible for individuals with all disabilities
to be productive employees, society’s negative attitudes and low expectations
continue to severely limit opportunities for competitive employment. And as long
as it remains legal to pay workers with disabilities less than the federal
minimum wage, there will be those who exploit these misconceptions in order to
justify employing workers with disabilities at subminimum wages, leaving
hundreds of thousands of individuals in segregated work environments that are
separate and unequal.
Despite
research demonstrating that segregated, subminimum wage work environments teach
workers with disabilities obsolete skills and unproductive work habits that must
be unlearned in order for them to become competitively employed, along with
well-documented cases of subminimum wage employees working in poor conditions
that are not acceptable in any modern workplace, advocates of Special Wage
Certificates argue that the answer is simply better enforcement of compliance
with current federal and state rules. But perpetuation of the current system is
acquiescence in the face of discrimination. Slavery, the denial of the right to
vote for women, and other forms of discrimination against classes of individuals
based solely on a characteristic that the individuals possessed were once
lawful. Society eventually realized that the only way to eliminate such
discrimination is to make it unlawful. Section 14(c) of the FLSA, enacted out of
ignorance about the true capacity of people with disabilities, is fundamentally
morally wrong. The only way to correct this injustice is to repeal this
discriminatory provision.
In
2012, the National Federation of the Blind made significant progress toward
achieving this goal. What started as our single voice calling to have the law
changed has grown into a chorus of fifty organizations of people with
disabilities making this demand. Eliminating subminimum wages was not part of
the conversation about disability rights before we began to speak out, but by
the end of 2012 the National Council on Disability, a federal agency that
advises Congress and the President on disability issues, had issued a report
recommending that subminimum wages be phased out.
We
are the voice of the nation’s blind, and we will use our voice to speak out
against people, policies, or programs that seek to exploit us or reduce us to a
status of second class citizenship. We look forward to a day when all Americans
have wage security, real opportunity, and true equality. Add your voice to ours
by signing our online petition at: http://www.nfb.org/fair-wages-petition.
For
more information on this important issue, please visit www.nfb.org/fair-wages.
Mr. Anil Lewis, M.P.A.
Director of Advocacy and Policy
“Eliminating Subminimum Wages for People with Disabilities”
NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
200 East Wells Street at Jernigan Place
Baltimore, Maryland 21230
(410) 659-9314 ext. 2374 (Voice)
(410) 685-5653 (FAX)
Email: alewis@nfb.org
Web: www.nfb.org
twitter: @anillife
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