[nfbwatlk] SUB MINIMUM WAGE

Mon Aug 13 00:09:48 UTC 2012

Here is the URL for the NFB's web page on the Fair Wages Initiative.
This page contains a lot of good information such as articles and
speeches surrounding the issue, supporting letters, and a list of the
over 45 other organizations that support the NFB on this initiative. I
have copied the history section of the home page below, and the
biggest figure that I remember is that 95% of workers in sheltered
workshops never move onto other or competitive employment. That
doesn't fare well if these entities want to continue relying on the
delusion that these sheltered workshops are career training centers to
get them more tax breaks and preferential contracts. Also, it is
estimated that 30% of vocational cases have sheltered workshop
employment as a goal for successful employment. I have sent this
message, and Mary Ellen's replies to Anil Lewis, the Fair Wages gooroo
at the national center. In the past, he has always been open to
providing whatever information anyone needs surrounding the issue, so
I have asked him to provide the facts and figures he shared at
national convention.

Before I copy the history, I think it is important to know that this
issue is new to a lot of people. I didn't know what to think of it
when I first heard about it, and it took me learning a lot of
information before I decided to support it. I think we should always
be supportive of people with all opinions even though it is easy to be
angry and short with people who don't agree with us. I think that with
other minority groups, minority ethnicities, LGBT, etc., we have made
efforts to include these people in the workplace, and for the most
part, people believe in the inherent judgment and intellect abilities
of many minority groups. Although it isn't perfect, I think we have
made progress. However, when it comes to people with disabilities, it
is still acceptable to treat them like we used to treat minorities and
pay them less than what they’re worth. so in my opinion, it is now
time for society to catch up and realize that the institutional ideas
they have been fed by society and their experiences about the inherent
incompetence of people with disabilities are flawed.

Just as the NFB training centers give blind people the proper training
to award them fair opportunity, other disabilities need similar
programs. If some people thought outside the box and developed
excellent and proven successful strategies for blind people to obtain
competitive employment, then I bet there are a ton of alternative
techniques that can be helpful for people with other disabilities,
and, of course, the blindness skills that the NFB advocates for are
still not prevalent. (Anil actually has a few stories of agencies
thinking outside the box and finding competitive employment for people
with an array of disabilities. So these do exist, but I don't think
they are as established or as familiar to us as the NFB centers.) So
instead of doing the popular thing and shuffling people that society
is too narrow-minded to creatively include into demeaning sheltered
workshops, we should foster independence. The first step in this
process is to get rid of the legislation that gives many entities no
incentive to treat their disabled workers fairly. Then we can attempt
to alter the attitudes of the trainers at these workshops to teach
transferable skills and to provide positivity and hope for a
fulfilling future.

History:

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.

For further background and history, please visit the links below.

http://www.nfb.org/fair-wages

Cindy

On 8/12/12, Gloria Whipple <glowhi at centurylink.net> wrote:
> Mary Ellen and Mike,
>
> Thank you!
>
> I agree with the both of you all the way.
>
> Gloria Whipple
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nfbwatlk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfbwatlk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of Mary Ellen
> Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2012 15:04
> To: 'NFB of Washington Talk Mailing List'
> Subject: Re: [nfbwatlk] SUB MINIMUM WAGE
>
> Paul,
>
> Either the minimum wage means something or it doesn't.  If your argument is
> that nobody should be guaranteed a minimum wage, that's an argument for a
> different list.
>
> Our contention is that, as long as there is a minimum wage, it should apply
> to all entities that sell goods and services.
>
> You mentioned that you needed to work to get your speed up to standard as a
> medical transcriber.  You argue that employers should not have to pay
> inefficient people in a manner that doesn't encourage them to improve.  I
> get that point and agree strongly that competence and good work attitudes
> should be rewarded.  If a company comes up with a standard of performance,
> it should be applied equally to all employees.  So if your employer paid
> piece rate to all employees at the same rate and followed all applicable
> laws, no problem.  But if blind transcribers were paid a piece rate while
> the sighted transcribers were paid an hourly wage, that's quite a different
> matter.  I worked in a sheltered shop one summer.  We worked four on a
> production line.  One day I happened to be working with another blind
> person
> and two sighted women.  One of the sighted women said to me, "Let's see if
> we can put out eight thousand parts today so that you can be paid the
> minimum wage.  Of course, we get it anyway, but we'd like you to have it."
> Everyone on the production line did exactly the same number of units per
> hour, but the sighted people on the line (unless they could be certified as
> having another disability) got the minimum wage.  Nobody could work faster
> than the slowest person on the line.  That meant that a new worker in
> training automatically brought down the wages of everyone on the line.
> Consequently, new workers weren't greeted with enthusiasm.  Also, if there
> was a production problem of any kind, workers had to wait for it to be
> resolved knowing they would be paid only half the minimum wage while they
> waited.  All the cost of inefficiencyy, no matter who caused it, was borne
> by the workers on the line.
>
> The shop packaged parts for a company owned by the chairman of the board of
> directors of the agency.  We used outdated production methods; our work
> could have been done more efficiently by a few machines.  However, the
> company got a huge tax advantage for having the sheltered workshop do the
> work.  The tax benefits for the company, paired with the low wages paid to
> the workers, meant that there was a considerable incentive for continuing
> to
> use outdated equipment and to refrain from automating.  As a consequence,
> nobody in that workshop learned any transferrable skills.  Also, the
> company
> owned by the chairman of the board categorically refused to hire any blind
> individuals in the company factory across the road.  If he had hired blind
> workers, much of the rationale of his charitable (and I put that in quotes)
> enterprise would have gone by the wayside.
>
> We packed clamps for attaching mufflers and tail pipes to cars.  One person
> took a flat box and opened it.  Two people (and they always used the people
> with the most sight for those jobs) dropped in muffler clamps which came in
> four parts.  The final person on the line closed the filled boxes and
> packed
> them into larger boxes for shipping.  If we were packing truck parts, we
> were allowed to do eight thousand units a day.  If we were packing car
> parts, we were allowed to do ten thousand.  We were paid $1.60 per thousand
> car parts and $1.80 for a thousand truck parts.  At the time, the minimum
> wage was $1.60 per hour.  That meant that we were only allowed to earn
> slightly more than the minimum wage if we worked flat out.  Really good
> workers charged with the responsibility for training new people were
> penalized, not rewarded, for doing the training.
>
> If people were simply paid the minimum wage, a few people would have earned
> a few dollars less per day and a few would have had their wages raised
> somewhat.  All of us worked with the knowledge that we were considered as
> being worth less by definition than other workers unless we could prove
> otherwise.
>
> I worked there for one summer while I was in college.  I have never worked
> so physically hard in my life!  Absolutely no attention was paid to finding
> ways for people to do their work with the least possible stress and strain
> on their bodies.  Most of the people I worked with were indistinguishable
> from the factory workers in my family, except that the ones in the shop
> were
> blind and got paid much less.  Almost all of them would have been perfectly
> able to pull their own weight in any factory in town.  They just couldn't
> get the people who did the hiring at local factories to believe it.
>
> But the worst part of the experience was the sense of hopelessness among
> the
> workers.  On my last day, one woman said "You go to college and get your
> education and get a good job so you don't ever have to come back here."
> Another man just laughed and said "She'll be back.  They always come back."
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nfbwatlk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfbwatlk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of PUBLIC RADIO 113
> Sent: August 12, 2012 12:16 PM
> To: nfbwatlk at nfbnet.org
> Subject: [nfbwatlk] SUB MINIMUM WAGE
>
> Would you hire a driver who only drove 20 miles/hour on the freeway?  If
> any
> of you reading this ever ran a business of your own you would realize that
> you cannot afford to hire workers who are less productive.  When I began my
> medical transcription career in Chicago I earned far less than minimum wage
> because I was paid on the basis of the work I could turn out in an 8-hour
> day.  It took a while for me to get my typing speed up to 120 words/minute,
> but I did.  After 30 years of being an MT I retired in June.
>  I made $50,000 last year WITH BENEFITS.  People who are so disabled that
> they cannot compete can always use SSDI, low-cost housing, food stamps,
> etc.,  to supplement their income.  It should not be up to the employer to
> provide a subsidy for disabled workers.   Let's pay congress what they're
> worth.
>
> --
> Paul Van Dyck
>
> www.publicradio113.weebly.com
>
> OR
>
> www.kboo.fm/soundsofawareness
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-- 
Cynthia Bennett
B.A. Psychology, UNC Wilmington

clb5590 at gmail.com
828.989.5383