[nfbmi-talk] NFB Imagineering Our Future: Exploitation or Equality? Special Issue

Sat Jul 23 00:41:23 UTC 2011

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Imagineering Our Future
     Special Issue 36—Exploitation or Equality?

 July 2011

Special Message from the Executive Director
Dear Friends,

Today we are wrapping up the 2011 National Federation of the Blind
Youth Slam.  For the past week blind mentors, instructors, and others
have been working with blind youth from forty-two states and Puerto
Rico to inspire and engage them in science, technology, engineering,
and math (STEM).  Through our work these students will know they have
the talent to pursue advanced careers.

Despite our great progress we still face significant barriers.  One
major barrier is the persistent thought that people with disabilities
are less productive, less energetic, and less imaginative than others
in the workforce.  Students have been asking their mentors why the law
permits employers to pay them less than the minimum wage while at the
same time we are teaching them that they can compete in advanced STEM
careers.

This afternoon I and another blind driver will be offering these youth
rides in our Blind Driver Challenge™ cars on the city streets
surrounding the National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute.
It is our conviction that these youth will enter the workforce at a
time when it is no longer permissible under law to pay people with
disabilities subminimum wages.  The time to act is now!  This issue is
so important and urgent that we have dedicated this month’s newsletter
to providing you information about this antiquated law and current
efforts that will further erode the right to equal pay for equal work
for blind youth.  I encourage you to educate yourself on this issue in
order to understand the deep-rooted misconceptions that still place
barriers in front of the blind. After observing a week of blind youth
doing real science, technology, engineering, and math, I am certain
that they will be part of the generation that finally overcomes this
outrageous misunderstanding of the capacity of people with
disabilities.

Thank you,

Mark A. Riccobono, Executive Director, NFB Jernigan Institute

P.S.  You can stay up to date on NFB Youth Slam by following
NFBScience on Twitter.

Unequal Pay for Equal Work
On Monday, July 18, the NFB took a half-page of space in the
Washington Post to bring to the public’s attention an appalling
situation.  The U.S. Senate is poised to pass a bill which endorses
paying subminimum wages to the blind. This is flagrant exploitation of
disabled workers! The blind of the nation are a group that already has
a 70 percent unemployment rate.  We need greater employment
opportunities, not lesser ones. We must keep the pressure on to
prevent this bill from becoming law.

Washington Post, July 18, 2011, page A12

The informational piece in the Washington Post reads:

Unequal pay for equal work on the basis of disability is unfair,
discriminatory, and immoral.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are being exploited.

They are working in sweatshops.

They are paid less than the federal minimum wage.

On August 3rd, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and
Pensions is scheduled to vote on the Workforce Investment Act. This
bill reauthorizes the outrageous practice of paying subminimum wages
to Americans with disabilities.

Will your senator vote for exploitation or equality?

Call your senator and ask.

For more information contact the National Federation of the Blind at
(410) 659-9314 or fairwages at nfb.org, or visit www.nfb.org.

The Senate HELP Committee (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) is
set to vote on August 3 on the Workforce Investment Act, which
contains language reauthorizing the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as
amended. The Rehabilitation Act is supposed to provide services to
disabled Americans so that they can obtain competitive employment, but
Title V, Section 511 of the proposed Rehabilitation Act language
references Section 14(c) of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA),
which allows certain entities holding special wage certificates to pay
workers with disabilities less than the federal minimum wage.

As President Maurer sums it up, “Unequal pay for equal work on the
basis of disability is unfair, discriminatory, and immoral. The
senators who serve on the HELP Committee must decide whether they
stand for the outrageous exploitation of disabled workers, or for true
equality for Americans with disabilities.”

 President Maurer speaks for all of us, “Language endorsing the
antiquated practice of paying the blind and other workers with
disabilities less than the federal minimum wage, which is based on the
fallacious premise that disabled workers cannot be productive and do
the same work as their non-disabled peers, has no place in legislation
designed to increase competitive work opportunities for workers with
disabilities. We believe that this language, in effect if not by
design, is a Trojan Horse provision that will inevitably lead to the
placing of workers with disabilities in subminimum-wage sweatshops. We
demand that the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee
either amend this bill to remove Title V, Section 511, or simply vote
down the entire bill.”

 At the national convention of the NFB just concluded in Orlando, the
2,900 delegates present voted unanimously to demand fair wages for
blind workers.  Unless the harmful language is removed, we reject
Workforce Investment Act reauthorization!  The text of the resolution
passed on this issue and other background information and historical
perspective are reproduced later in this newsletter.

Therefore, we are engaged in a national campaign of public education
in order to let everyone know about the antiquated and immoral
practice of paying workers with disabilities subminimum wages.
Outraged Americans have been calling Senate HELP Committee chairman
Tom Harkin and other members’ offices to respectfully express their
adamant objection to linking subminimum wage to the Rehabilitation
Act, and to insist that Section 511 of the Rehabilitation Act be
removed from the bill.

NFB members will also conduct informational protests across the United
States to raise awareness about the practice of paying wages below the
federal minimum wage to Americans with disabilities. The protests will
take place on July 26, the twenty-first anniversary of the Americans
with Disabilities Act, at the primary district office locations of
United States Senators serving on the Senate Committee on Health,
Education, Labor and Pensions (the HELP Committee).

For more resources and information, please write to fairwages at nfb.org,
read the official Web page Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities,
or visit our home page, www.nfb.org.  If you want future updates on
this critically important matter, please sign up to receive our press
releases.   You can help us to achieve true equality for Americans
with disabilities.

Background
 Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) allows
entities holding what are called “special wage certificates” to pay
their disabled workers less than the federal minimum wage. These
entities are almost always segregated workplaces, sometimes called
“sheltered workshops,” that employ workers with various disabilities,
including sensory, physical, and cognitive or developmental
disabilities. Federal law requires that certain goods and services
procured by the federal government be purchased from these sheltered
workshops in order to provide workers with disabilities with
employment, but these workers do not have the same protections that
other American workers have. Most importantly they do not receive the
federal minimum wage. In recent times some of these sheltered
workshops have begun to pay disabled workers the minimum wage or
higher. Because they receive very lucrative federal contracts, even
those workshops that are paying workers competitive wages have no
trouble maintaining their operations and even being quite profitable.
But some shops still claim that they would be unable to continue their
operations and would have to fire their workers with disabilities if
forced to pay the minimum wage, even though this claim is demonstrably
false.

In 1973 Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act, and in 1990 the
Americans with Disabilities Act became law. Both of these laws are
designed to help workers with disabilities obtain competitive
employment outside of these sheltered workshops.

The Current Issue
 A bill before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and
Pensions (commonly called the HELP Committee), the Workforce
Investment Act (WIA), contains language in Title V reauthorizing the
Rehabilitation Act of 1973. A new section of this title, Section 511,
allows rehabilitation agencies, which are supposed to place workers
with disabilities in competitive employment, to place workers in
sheltered workshops that pay subminimum wages instead, under certain
circumstances. The Rehabilitation Act has never before endorsed or
been linked to the payment of subminimum wages, and the National
Federation of the Blind and our partners do not want to see such a
link established now. We are asking the senators on the HELP Committee
to remove Section 511 from the Workforce Investment Act and to support
fair wages for all workers with disabilities.

RESOLUTION 2011-17:  Regarding the Workforce Investment Act Reauthorization
WHEREAS, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and
Pensions has distributed language for the reauthorization of the
Workforce Investment Act including a proposed Section 511 of Title V
(the Rehabilitation Act), which would provide for employment of people
with significant disabilities at wages below the federally mandated
minimum wage; and

WHEREAS, the proposed language of Section 511 would be a tacit
endorsement of the subminimum wage provision found in Section 14(c) of
the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and its antiquated contention that
people with disabilities cannot be competitively employed; and

WHEREAS, this language links the Rehabilitation Act, which was
established to assist people with disabilities in obtaining
competitive integrated employment, with Section 14(c) of the FLSA,
which is based on the false premise that people with disabilities
cannot be competitively employed and therefore can be paid subminimum
wages; and

WHEREAS, the language in Section 511 that defines what steps a
vocational rehabilitation counselor must take before steering a client
into subminimum-wage employment is intended to prevent youth with
disabilities from being tracked into subminimum-wage jobs, but is
likely instead to track clients into subminimum-wage employment; and

WHEREAS, language in Section 511 asserts that employers holding a
certificate that allows them to pay subminimum wages can also serve as
training facilities for people with disabilities, a claim that ignores
the fact that job training services provided by an employer holding a
special wage certificate are likely to reinforce the low expectation
that workers with disabilities cannot be competitively employed, since
the incentive is for the employer to continue exploiting their labor
rather than prepare workers for other employment; and

WHEREAS, the Section 511 documentation and review process, which is
meant to provide safeguards against inappropriate use of
subminimum-wage employment, does not take into consideration the fact
that state Vocational Rehabilitation programs do not have the
resources to ensure effective compliance with the various
documentation and review requirements, including the six-month review
period in the proposed language, creating an opportunity to expand the
exploitation caused by Section 14(c) of the FLSA; and

WHEREAS, the good intentions motivating the development of Section 511
are likely to result in enormous negative consequences, especially the
validation of subminimum-wage employment as a viable outcome for
people with disabilities; and

WHEREAS, the language does not provide an effective procedure for
workers to challenge improper placement in such employment: Now,
therefore,

BE IT RESOLVED by the National Federation of the Blind in Convention
assembled this seventh day of July, 2011, in the city of Orlando,
Florida, that this organization call on members of the Senate
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions to remove Section
511 of the proposed Rehabilitation Act; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we call upon all members of Congress, not
to address the unjust law of Section 14(c) with ineffective measures,
but to take direct action to abolish the reprehensible practice of
subminimum-wage employment forever.

Citation
July 6th was the 100th anniversary of Dr. Jacobus tenBroek’s birth. It
seems only fitting to include a quote from our founder on the practice
of paying subminimum wages to blind workers:

. . . sheltered workshops have failed to fulfill their responsibility
to their employees. Indeed, they have for the most part sought to
avoid the normal obligations of employers through exemption from the
laws fixing minimum standards of employment and working conditions.
Workers in sheltered shops deserve and require the same protection of
their rights as do the workers in other industries: specifically, with
respect to wages, hours, vacations, sick leave, labor-management
relations, and the like. However, blind workshop employees have never
received, and do not now receive, such protection. Not only do wages
fail to meet the cost of living; they fail to meet the minimum
requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act, from which sheltered
shops have in fact been explicitly exempted. Nor can blind workshop
employees hope to improve conditions by their own efforts; for one
thing, they are not organized into unions, and for another thing (as
noted earlier) they have been denied the collective bargaining
protection of the National Labor Relations Act. Finally, many of these
employees do not have entitlement to workmen’s compensation or Social
Security privileges, and most are denied the benefits of unemployment
compensation. In short, blind workers in sheltered employment are
virtually in the position of wards, without legal rights or recourse,
and reduced to an abject dependency upon the good will and discretion
of their employers. In such circumstances, it is conservative
understatement to say that sheltered workshops have failed to meet the
conditions of employment to which American workers are entitled and
accustomed.

—Dr. Jacobus tenBroek, “The Character and Function of Sheltered
Workshops,” Blind American, May 1962

Thank you for reading the NFB Jernigan Institute’s Imagineering Our Future

Support the Jernigan Institute through the Imagination Fund

Interesting links:
Archive of Straight Talk about Vision Loss videos

National Center for Blind Youth in Science

Access Technology Tips

TeachBlind Students.org

Blogs:
Access Technology

Voice of the Nation’s Blind

Publication archives:
Future Reflections

Braille Monitor

Visit us at nfb.org

Jernigan Institute, National Federation of the Blind
200 East Wells Street at Jernigan Place, Baltimore, MD 21230
(410) 659-9314      Fax (410) 659-5129      E-mail JerniganInstitute at nfb.org
Visit us at www.nfb.org

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