When Jan Dougherty’s son, Ryan, graduated from high school in Canton, Ohio, in 2002, school counselors and vocational rehabilitation providers told her that the only place he belonged was a sheltered workshop.
“We were told Ryan didn’t belong in the community,” Dougherty says. Ryan, who is autistic, was considered “too disabled” to work.
When it was passed in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) established a federal minimum wage, guidelines for overtime pay, and child labor restrictions. It also created 14(c) certificates that permit employers to pay people with disabilities less than the minimum wage. According to a 2020 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Americans with disabilities earn on average less than half of the federal minimum wage per hour. In October 2022, at least 70,000 people with disabilities were working for 14(c) certificate holders, earning less than the minimum wage.
But the report also highlighted a lack of data regarding the practice. Neil Romano, chair of the National Council on Disability, told the commission during testimony, “We collect data on things we view as important, and historically, we just don’t count people with disabilities.”
The number of people working in sheltered workshops for subminimum wage has steadily decreased in recent years. But the full elimination of 14(c) certificates has been slow, meeting resistance from vocational rehabilitation service providers that still view sheltered workshops as a justifiable...
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