[Nfbmt] Fwd: Blog Post: Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities

[Dan Burke]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Lewis, Anil" <ALewis at nfb.org>
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 16:02:24 +0000
Subject: Blog Post: Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities
To: "Lewis, Anil" <ALewis at nfb.org>
Cc: "Hartle, Jesse" <JHartle at nfb.org>, "McLarney, Lauren"
<LMcLarney at nfb.org>, "Lottino, Taeler" <Tlottino at nfb.org>, "Pare,
John" <JPare at nfb.org>


Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities
https://nfb.org/blog/vonb-blog/fair-wages-workers-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<http://www.nfb.org/fair-wages>.


Mr. Anil Lewis, M.P.A.
Director of Advocacy and Policy

"Eliminating Subminimum Wages for People with Disabilities"
http://www.nfb.org/fairwages

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 at nfb.org<mailto:alewis at nfb.org>
Web: www.nfb.org<http://www.nfb.org>
twitter: @anillife




-- 
Dan Burke, President
The National Federation of the Blind of Montana
www.nfbmontana.org
Visit us on Face Book at http://bit.ly/nfbmtfb
My Cell:  406.546.8546
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