The subminimum wage allows employers to pay people with disabilities cents on the hour for their work. A provision in the Build Back Better Act would incentivize states to help end the practice.
Originally published by The 19th.
For almost a century, it has been completely legal for companies to pay workers with disabilities mere cents on the hour. Employees have reported receiving pennies in their paychecks, with no limit on how little they can be paid.
This practice of paying “subminimum wage,” which the U.S. Department of Labor allows under the auspices of maintaining employment opportunities for people with disabilities, has also led to some workers being sequestered in workshops away from the regular workforce, where they have little opportunity to advance into other jobs. About 1,500 of those workshops remain nationwide, employing more than an estimated 100,000 people with disabilities at companies including Goodwill and day service providers such as Opportunity Village, even as 15 states have moved to ban the practice.
Subminimum wage is “literally trapping disabled people in impoverished wages, meaning they are going to be reliant on other programs to keep them in housing, to keep them off the streets, to keep them from being able to receive health care service,” said Mia Ives-Rublee, the director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
Now, a little-known provision in the Build Back Better Act being...
migrants to fake being gay to claim asylum in the U. K. . . . Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so ...