A House bill, the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act, aims to eliminate the federal “subminimum wage”—the ability for employers to pay workers with significant disabilities below today’s hourly federal wage floor of $7.25 per hour.
Current law allows employers to apply for a federal certificate from the Department of Labor (DoL) to hire subminimum wage workers. A worker having a disability is not sufficient to obtain one. The employer must actually go through a quite bureaucratic process of providing proof that the specific disability significantly impairs a worker’s on-the-job productivity and by how much. Employers must conduct a “prevailing wage survey” to ascertain the wage of someone able-bodied doing the same type, quality, and quantity of work in the local labor market as well, such that a productivity-adjusted subminimum wage can be determined for the worker.
Estimates differ for how many employers bother to go through this difficult process, which requires the productivity of hourly paid workers to be reevaluated every six months and a new prevailing wage survey every year. But one DoL study estimates this exemption still covers as many as 321,131 workers. This includes “sheltered workshops,” which often employ people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to undertake tasks such as “bagging newspapers, shredding papers by hand or wrapping silverware in napkins.” A change in the law, then, would affect a significant number of people and some of the country’s most vulnerable.
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