Hillary Clinton has vowed to take on an issue no candidate has mentioned before. If elected, she wants to close the legal loophole allowing disabled workers to receive a wage less than minimum wage.
As if living with a disability wasn’t hard enough, employers can get away with paying disabled people less than the minimum wage. The federal minimum wage law Section 14(c), allows employers to get exempted from paying the minimum wage to disabled people. Only employers that get a Section 14(c) certificate can use this loophole. But, this loophole shouldn’t have been there in the first place!
Here is her statement on this issue:
“When it comes to jobs, we’ve got to figure out how we get the minimum wage up and include people with disabilities in the minimum wage… [R]ight now there is a tiered wage when it comes to facilities that do provide opportunities but not at a self-sufficient wage that enables people to gain a degree of independence as far as they can go. So I want us to take a hard look at raising the minimum wage and ending the tiered minimum wages…
“When people talk about raising the minimum wage, they don’t always talk about the legal loopholes that we have in it and I want to get rid of those and I want to get rid of that for people with disabilities too.”
An investigation revealed that Goodwill Industries exploits this loophole very often. Some of their workers in Pennsylvania were making as low as $0.22 an hour. The CEO is making a six-figure salary.
This horrific program, called the “subminimum wage” started in 1938 with the passing of Federal Labor Standard Act. The law set up the minimum wage and overtime pay rules. It made sense in the 30s when employers needed an incentive to hire disabled veterans. It no longer makes sense today with the civil rights advancements that disabled people have made.
We need to get to a fair wage for everyone. Disabled people need to be able to live independently if possible.
Featured image by Keith Cooper via flickr, available under Creative Commons 2.0 license.
