The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was one of the most revolutionary of the New Deal alphabet soup, a bill Franklin Delano Roosevelt once claimed was the most important piece of legislation since the Social Security Act.
In today’s U.S., the FLSA establishes minimum wage, youth employment standards, record-keeping and overtime. It is the very foundation of workers' rights in every form of industry, public or private.
Yet, despite being one of the most important bills ever passed in U.S. history, a specific part of the bill promotes a discrimination wage setting that affects thousands of workers across the U.S. After many failed attempts such as the Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities Act of 2013, the resolution of this issue must be made a priority by the Obama administration.
Section 14(c) of the FLSA gives public and private employers the ability to obtain special certificates from the Department of Labor’s Wage & Hour Division that allow them to compensate workers with disabilities at rates below minimum wage based on the individual’s level of productivity.
For more than 70 years, this section of the FLSA has legally allowed large corporations to pay workers with disabilities rates that are far below the standard of minimum as long as they have a certificate from the state government.
According to ThinkProgress.org, it is estimated that 420,000 U.S. citizens with disabilities are employed under the 14(c) wage certificate. The same study indicates that nearly 95 percent of these citizens are also employed in “work center” that employ larger numbers of people with disabilities.
According to a Forbes article, Goodwill came under scrutiny two years ago for paying its workers with disabilities as little as 22 cents, 38 cents and 41 cents an hour. This makes Section 14(c) inherently flawed: It only applies specifically to workers with disabilities, creating the notion that workers are less productive because of disabilities and mental illnesses.
As a result, Section 14(c) of the FLSA has created disturbing trends among Americans with disabilities and mental illnesses. The National Council on Disability has found that Americans with disabilities are about three times as likely to live in poverty and only 18 percent of the disabled participate in the work force.
The Obama administration has heard this issue before and has taken steps to currently address it. An Executive Order for Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces in 2014 stated that all individuals working under service or concessions contracts within the federal government will be covered by wage protections. But, according to Fortune, the problem is that this executive order only applies to a small population of people and federal contracted workers already frequently have the ability to make more than the minimum wage.
Then there is the Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities Act of 2013 which had the potential of ending this exploitation of Americans by repealing Section 14(c) and allowing individuals to no longer have to work in sub-minimum wage workshops. The bill stated that corporations and businesses would have three years to enact models and business structures that would instead have the ability to assist individuals with disabilities with finding more competitive jobs at stronger, healthier wages by repealing wage certificates.
There is only one problem. As much as the Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities Act of 2013 sounds like a good idea, it died in Congress. Again, Fortune reports that the bill, which was sponsored by Republican Gregg Harper of Mississippi, only had 62 co-sponsors in the 113th session of Congress. That means that it did not have enough support to even merit a committee vote. GovTrack had it at an 8 percent chance of making it pass the committee at the time.
The Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities Act is a great way to solve the problems of the FLSA, but Congress must first give it a chance in this new session if U.S. citizens with disabilities hope to have any chances at protection from sub-minimum wage.
Reach the columnist at ndsmit12@asu.edu or follow @noahsmith1996 on Twitter.
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Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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