After graduating from a Massachusetts technical high school, John Anton took a job in a sheltered workshop north of Boston where he and other people with disabilities did piecework like packaging items in boxes.
The pay was puny — well below minimum wage — and the work was a poor use of his abilities, said Anton, who was in his early 20s at the time and had studied agriculture in high school.
“It was very boring and unsatisfying for me,” said Anton, who has Down syndrome and testified at a July congressional hearing on a proposal to ban those subpar wages.
“My friends,” Anton continued,” would be sitting around playing cards, watching videos, just hanging out with nothing to work on. I got paid very little for the work I did.”
Though it hasn’t come up for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, a proposal with 23 Republican and Democratic co-sponsors, would phase out the 84-year-old special waivers — known as 14(c) certificates — exempting employers from paying workers with disabilities the minimum wage. U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-Washington), who has a son with Down syndrome, is among co-sponsors of the resolution, which was introduced in April.
A lot would be lost if Congress passes it, said Matthew Putts, CEO of a Hanover, N.J. job program certified to employ 130 people at a sub-minimum wage that he would not disclose to Youth Today.
“Elimination of 14(c) certificates as proposed in H.R. 2373 would eliminate employment opportunities for thousands of employees who want to be able to choose the type of employment that makes the most sense for them,” said Putts, who also testified at that July congressional hearing. “In fact, the outright elimination of 14(c) certificates benefits no one.”
Anton disagrees, based on his personal experience at that job after high school and what he, since then, has observed during decades tracking disabled workers.
“People with disabilities need real jobs (with) real pay and this is not happening in the workshops,” Anton, now 53, told Youth Today
Since 2011, he has been the legislative specialist for the Massachusetts Down Syndrome Congress and, before that, was regional and state chair of Massachusetts Advocates Standing Strong.
“Sheltered workshops” have paid disabled workers an average of $3.34 per hour
Since the federal minimum wage was enacted in 1937, the government has allowed businesses and nonprofit organizations to apply for waivers allowing them to pay less than that to people with disabilities in what are known as sheltered workshops, where people with disabilities perform tasks with support and supervision of non-disabled people.
Workshop proponents say they provide valuable opportunities in a safe work environment to people who often struggle to find jobs.
A report published last year by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that, as of 2018, more than 100,000 Americans with disabilities were working sub-minimum wage jobs at about 1,500 organizations with 14(c) waivers.
At $3.34 per hour, those jobs paid less than half of the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
Such jobs are exploitative and undignified, said Anton, citing the kind of work he did and that others still do. The sheltered workshop job he left back in his early 20s involved “piecework,” meaning workers were paid by the number of items they packed into those boxes. Because that work depended on the shop getting contracts with outside companies, it was unsteady.
Putts told Youth Today that not all 14(c) workshop experiences are like that. He said he was prevented from disclosing the wages that individual workers are paid. But, according to the website for his organization, Employment Horizons, paid employees a total of $1.4 million in 2020.
That work helps disabled employees learn a variety of skills, he said, including collating, labeling and cleaning and about the food service industry.
“Perhaps more importantly however, they learn a variety of soft skills that are difficult to obtain other than through actually working,” Putts said. “Some examples of these soft skills include being on time for work and coming back from breaks on time, getting along with co-workers, taking feedback from a supervisor, increasing endurance to work through a full day, making appropriate workplace conversation, and asking for assistance when needed.”
Those skills help some of them move on to more competitive employment in the community, Putts said. He added that Employment Horizons offers a “hybrid” program in which employees work part-time in the workshop and part-time in the community. In 2020, 44 workers moved from Employment Horizons into jobs in the community and 91% were still in those jobs after three months, he said.
“Employment Horizons, and other programs across the country, work continuously to help program participants achieve their vocational goals both within our facility-based programs and in the community,” Putts said.
Without that on-ramp, Putts said some people with disabilities are bound to struggle with competitive employment, especially if Congress raises the nationwide minimum wage to $15 per hour, as it is considering. New Jersey raised its minimum wage to $12 an hour this year, and employers there are already expecting more productivity from their workers, he said.
Researcher: “Job coaches” who support disabled workers in well-paying, mainstream employment are a better option than sheltered workshops
Labor researcher Valerie Brooke, director of training for the Autism Center of Excellence at Virginia Commonwealth University, said research suggests that sub-minimum wage jobs in sheltered workshops do not help people obtain competitive employment in the community.
People in sheltered workshops are usually not building marketable skills and the workshops have no incentive to train them for jobs other than menial piecework, said Brooke, who has studied the employment of people with disabilities for decades.
“If I have some people who are really good at doing that, you don’t want to get rid of them,” Brooke said. “So there’s a disincentive to really kind of interrupt that continuum, and get rid of your best workers. So the whole business model that it’s built on doesn’t really play out.”
Brooke said a more effective alternative is supported employment, in which people with disabilities take competitive jobs in their communities alongside a job coach. The coach helps train them until they’re able to perform the job tasks on their own, then stays in contact to troubleshoot any problems that arise and help workers move on to other jobs if they want to.
Using that model, Brooke said, her university’s Rehabilitation Research and Training Center has helped people with disabilities score good-paying jobs with major Virginia employers like Dominion Energy and Bon Secours St. Mary’s Hospital.
“Even the people that sheltered workshops say are people with significant disabilities, those people are working,” Brooke said. “We are working with them every single day. Significant autism, brain injury, severe, significant intellectual disabilities. We’ve had physical disabilities, psychiatric disabilities.”
A network of supported employment organizations called The Association of People Supporting Employment First now stretches across most of the country, with 3,000 participating organizations and local chapters in 39 states.
Brooke said she hopes more segregated, sub-minimum wage jobs for people with disabilities gradually are eliminated, which is already happening in some parts of the country. Minnesota is set to join Alaska, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Oregon, Vermont, Rhode Island and Texas in phasing out recognition of 14(c) certificates.
As of July 1, there were just short of 1,300 organizations nationwide still using the waiver, and many of them had allowed it to lapse into a pending status. Brooke said that was likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic causing organizations to deem it too risky to gather vulnerable people together in one place for work. And she wonders how many workshops will re-emerge post-pandemic.
Anton, of Massachusetts, hopes the future will bring better-paying work prospects for the individuals he advocates for. His own experience reinforces that hope.
“I knew I could do more with my life than piece work and food service. I had goals for my life and needed to make a decent wage to reach them.” Anton said. “There is nothing I love more than advocating for people with disabilities (and) getting paid a real wage for it. “I love my current job.”
