The Americans With Disabilities Making Under Minimum Wage

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The federal minimum wage has been around in the US for nearly ninety years. Today, it's set at seven twenty five an hour. By law, employers in the country can't pay workers less than that amount, but it doesn't apply to everyone.

From the time that Congress created a wage floor for the country, legislators also created an exception.

Josh Eidelson is a senior reporter for Bloomberg covering the workplace, and he spent the past year looking into a program that for decades has allowed employers to pay a certain group of workers below that federal floor, workers with disabilities. The program is called fourteen C.

The fourteen C program was created by Congress to ensure that the labor of people with disabilities would not be too expensive for companies to want to purchase it.

Fourteen C is a section of labor law in the US that lets employers pay sub minimum wage rates to people with a range of disabilities based on their productivity, and in some extreme cases. Josh says, the rate employers come up with is close to zero.

Records I reviewed show employers have reported paying, in one case as little as five cents an hour to an employee.

Fourteen C workers have packaged medical supplies in Missouri and lipstick for Grammy Award gift bags. They've worked as janitors, assembled car owners' manuals and clean parts used to build F thirty five fighter jets, and people's views on the program can be divided. There are people like Brady Bartley, a twenty nine year old with autism who worked in Ohio.

You just sit there and you're like, Wow, these people are really taking advantage of me here.

And people like Michelle Jardine, a sixty year old with an intellectual disability and borderline personality disorder who works at a nonprofit in Texas.

I just love it here. It's not perfect, but it's close to it. It's the only place I have been in and I'd met so many friends.

Now, fourteen C workers are at the center of a debate over whether a program that was designed to create more opportunities for people with disabilities is actually living up to that promise, and whether it should exist at all. Today, on the show, the Battle over the future of sub minimum wage jobs in the United States. This is the

There was concern that with a federal minimum wage that said you have to pay any employee this much per hour, there would be people whose disabilities made them work less productively, who would therefore not be hired or not stay hired by employers.

And when we're talking about workers with disabilities who are eligible for this program, what range of disability does it encompass?

Disabilities such as cerebral palsy autism. In recent years, most workers paid a fourteen C subminimum wage have had some sort of intellectual or developmental disability.

And how do these companies determine the pay rate for employees with disabilities.

It's complicated by law. The pay under the fourteen C program is supposed to be commensurate, meaning that workers are being paid in proportion to their productivity. The amount less than the federal minimum wage that a fourteen SEED worker can be paid is supposed to be in proportion to the amount less that they are producing at a task as compared to a non disabled worker, and there is

And how do all these metrics come together to calculate the wage that these workers are paid. What's the range there?

Some workers under the fourteen Seed program end up making close to to the federal minimum wage or over it if they have a particularly productive hour. Other workers are making much less. Federal law does not set any specific floor that a worker has to be paid per hour under the fourteen SEA program.

Many fourteen SEA employers are what's known as sheltered workshops. Those are often nonprofits that employ Americans with disabilities in a separate setting from other workers. These employers apply for fourteen SEA certificates exempting them from the normal minimum wage, and then they set piece rates or hourly rates for the workers they hire. Almost half of workers in the program make below three point fifty an hour. The Department of Labor said last year, nearly two percent make twenty

Critics of the fourteen C program say that this reinforces stigma and discrimination against people with disabilities, that it sends a signal to the public and to employers that people with disabilities are not equal and are not as capable as other workers. They argue, there's a whole lot that the government does, and even more the government could be doing to support integrated, dignified, well paying jobs for people with disabilities.

But its supporters say the program provides an important employment option for people who might not otherwise have one. Tens of millions of American adults have some sort of disability, a broad category of conditions that can make it tougher to move perceive, communicate, or learn, and while about three quarters of non disabled working age Americans are employed, only about two and five of those with disabilities are.

One of the arguments I heard over and over was that work in America can be hostile and unfair to people with disabilities, and that the outside world beyond these workshops has not met its responsibility to support people with disabilities and treat them fairly.

In the course of his reporting, Josh reviewed federal and state records, visited fourteen C workplaces, and spoke with over one hundred people, including regulators, disability advocates, employers, and workers. One of the fourteen C employers Josh visited is called the Brookwood Community. It's a nonprofit where he met a woman named Michelle Jardine.

Michelle has an intellectual disability which can make it harder to learn and understand instructions, and borderline personality disorder, which can lead to outbursts. She had a series of bad experiences in other workplaces.

I was basically bullied in front of the coworkers, call me stupid, dumb, I'll never mount to anything, stuff like that. So it wasn't a healthy situation for.

Me, and because of the bullying she says she experienced at other integrated workplaces, she switched and started working at Brookwood.

Here I've learned that hey, I'm okay, I am kind, really kind and consider it, and I've met lots of friends here.

She has a job there glazing in the ceramics shop. She makes a piece rate that on average amounts to around one to three dollars an hour.

Mischelle receives financial support from her family and lives at Brookwood, and although she says she's found fulfillment and friendship there, her workplace is among those that have been found violating the terms of fourteen C. Brookwood has been cited twice by the Labor Department for violations like not conducting adequate time studies for employees and not providing required information on

Brady Bartley is a man with autism in Ohio who went to a fourteen C employer where he worked disassembling speedometers. You were getting paid how much at the beginning three dollars.

There was not a lot a life livable amount to live off of. I've never been happier than when I worked at that place, but you can't survive off of it.

Management there was very nice and was very smiley, but over time he concluded that they were ripping him off.

At the time, I was kind of homeless, so it was really the only option I had at the moment. I literally lived off of nick Chickens for a dollar.

And importantly, Brady, like many other people I talked to who worked in the fourteen C program and became critics of it, Brady says his employer was not at all trying to prepare him to find a better job somewhere else. He says his employer presented the outside world as a place that was hostile and scary.

But eventually Brady found a new manufacturing job, one that pays above minimum wage in an integrated environment.

He said he does get frequent breaks that are a helpful accommodation for him with his disability, and rather than three dollars an hour. He makes over twenty dollars an hour, and he didn't portray this job as some nirvana. He said, sometimes he gets made fun of for the way he talks.

I have a lot of trouble with my words and stuff, so that people are very mean sometimes and you're going to have to work past that. But it's worth it. It's way better than no money. Tell you that.

For people who oppose the sub minimum wage, stories like Brady's prove that fourteen C is far from the only option people with certain disabilities have to find meaningful employment that pays at least the federal standard. But for its defenders, stories like Michelle's highlight the ways fourteen seed jobs are deeply meaningful. These tensions have shaped the debate over the fourteen C program for decades, and they've recently been coming to a head. So what could the future of the

Since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in nineteen ninety, there have been a series of state and federal developments that have put pressure on the program and created a reckoning that is not over yet. More than a dozen states have passed laws to phase out subminimum wage within their borders. Under the Obama administration, the President signed in executive order requiring that people working on federal contracts make

So what will you be watching for next to get a sense of what the future of this program looks like?

One question is what will the Trump administration do specifically with this proposed regulation that they inherited from the Biden administration? Another is what will happen to the broader set of supports that the government provides to help people succeed in competitive integrated employment. Another question is what will enforcement look

Would the future of government reform and open question. Josh found that some former fourteen C employers are pushing for change on their own.

Some of the vocal critics now of the fourteen C program are employers that used to pay a subminimum wage themselves. The experience of some of the employers that have ended their sub minimum wage is that it changed their thinking and made them come up with more efficient or more profitable lines of business, and that it changed the calculation

This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Jeff Muscus. It was fact checked by audrean Atapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Supia. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Tonso. Our deputy executive producer is Julia Weaver. Our executive producer is Nicole beamsterborg Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head