This article was originally published by ProPublica and The Kansas City Beacon as part of ProPublica's Local Reporting Network initiative.

One weekday morning in July, Kerstie Bramlet was at her workstation inside the Warren County Sheltered Workshop near St. Louis, 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...

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