One weekday morning in July, Kerstie Bramlet was at her workstation inside the Warren County Sheltered Workshop near St. Louis, Missouri, putting plastic labels on rabbit-meat dog chews one by one.
The 30-year-old, who wore a St. Louis Cardinals shirt and a blue-and-white tie-dye hat, is autistic and has intellectual disabilities. She was on dog-chew assignment that day with a dozen or so coworkers, who are also disabled. As they chatted excitedly about an upcoming bocce ball tournament — part of a local Special Olympics event — Bramlet and her coworkers formed an assembly line of sorts, some counting the dog chews using a gridded piece of paper to ensure they reached the right total before handing them off to a supervisor for shrink-wrapping.
Eventually, a six-pack of the dog chews would be sold on Amazon for $14.99.
For this work, Bramlet earns $1.50 an hour. It’s legal to pay her such a low rate because she works at what is known as a sheltered workshop, which can pay subminimum wages to disabled workers like her under a federal law enacted more than 80 years ago. At that rate, if Bramlet kept a full-time schedule working 40 hours a week and took no time off, she’d earn $3,120 a year, less than a quarter of the federal poverty level.
By design, employment in sheltered workshops is supposed to be a temporary measure — a training process to allow disabled adults to transition into the regular workforce.
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