After 86 Years, Disabled Workers Could Finally Receive Minimum Wage Protections

For nearly 90 years, the wealthiest country in the world has allowed thousands of disabled people to be paid mere pennies on the dollar. Now, after decades of advocacy from disability justice activists, the U.S. Department of Labor has finally announced plans to end the exploitative practice.

Any move to reverse a decades-old injustice is cause for celebration. But as a second Donald Trump presidency looms, the future of the potential rule change looks uncertain. And disability advocates fear that the fledgling proposal might never get the chance to leave its nest.

When Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, it established essential protections for U.S. workers, including the right to a minimum wage and overtime pay. But the law included a cruel carve-out in the form of Section 14(c), allowing employers to obtain certificates to pay disabled workers a subminimum wage. Already, you might recall, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at a paltry $7.25 an hour for more than a decade. But there’s no floor to how low wages for disabled workers can go. Half of the people working under the Department of Labor’s Section 14(c) certificate program — the vast majority of whom have an intellectual or developmental disability — make less than $3.50 an hour.

The initial inclusion of Section 14(c) purported to be a good thing for disabled workers, providing businesses with an economic incentive to hire them and thereby expanding employment opportunities for the disabled community. In reality, the program has prevented thousands of disabled people from obtaining fair and meaningful work opportunities, while trapping them in cycles of poverty. More than one in four disabled adults in the United States were living in poverty in 2022, compared to just 11.5 percent of adults without disabilities.

The Department of Labor is accepting comments on its proposed change until January 17, 2025. If the rule is finalized, it would cease the issuance of new subminimum wage certificates and begin a three-year period of phasing out existing certificates.

“The change is extremely important, because it states that the federal government recognizes disabled people as full human beings,” Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director for the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, told Truthout. “It’s one of many steps that we need to take in order to pull down a lot of these draconian patronizing policies that keep disabled people poor.”

A cornerstone of the Section 14(c) program is the use of sheltered workshops, which Ives-Rublee likened to sweatshops: warehouses where disabled workers are sequestered and made to perform often menial work for cents on the dollar. In 2022, The Kansas City Beacon and ProPublica analyzed employment data from the more than 5,000 disabled adults employed at 97 sheltered workshops across Missouri. Their investigation found that, while sheltered workshops are intended to be temporary training measures, very few employees ever left for regular-paying jobs.

“The change is extremely important, because it states that the federal government recognizes disabled people as full human beings.”

Ives-Rublee similarly noted that, while lawmakers might have initially passed Section 14(c) with the intention of encouraging businesses to hire disabled workers, the certificate program is in fact “a hallmark of the general patronizing viewpoint of disabled people and their worth in society.”

Rather than seek to convince businesses that hiring disabled people is a good thing to do in its own right, Section 14(c) tries “to utilize a capitalist mindset of, ‘Oh, these people aren’t worth as much, so you don’t have to pay as much,’” Ives-Rublee told Truthout.

In an interview with ProPublica in 2022, State Sen. Bill White (R-Missouri) echoed this sentiment himself. “This wonderful idea that we’re going to put everybody in the mainstream and everybody will be able to participate and function perfectly in this economy isn’t true,” he said. “They’re just not as able to be as fast, as productive and as efficient.”

The proposed federal rule change, however, arrives as 16 states have already banned subminimum wage for disabled workers — and provided data that directly contradicts this ableist argument against phasing out Section 14(c).

A Washington Post analysis of eight states that banned subminimum wage found that overall employment rates for adults with cognitive disabilities actually increased after the certificate programs were ended.

“There’s a general fear from families about where their children are going to go after 14(c) goes away. There’s a fear of them not having a place to work or not having some meaningful activity,” said Ives-Rublee. “But we’ve seen from studies that that’s not actually true.”

Unfortunately, given the Biden administration’s last-minute attempt to push through this rule change, when Donald Trump enters the White House next month, his administration will have the power to pause or revoke it. So far, however, Trump has not shared his stance on Section 14(c). Ives-Rublee calls disability “a weird third rail policy area,” because it impacts Republicans as much as Democrats, and some conservatives have been willing to work in favor of certain disability justice measures.

Project 2025, the far right policy blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, also does not address the issue of subminimum wage. However, it proposes changes that would hurt disabled people, including cuts to Medicaid and Medicare and the elimination of the Department of Education. While strides have been made in recent years to ensure equitable educational opportunities for disabled people, eliminating the Department of Education would dismantle the coordinated resources offered by the department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. Disability justice advocates warn that this could hinder both disabled people’s educational opportunities and later-employment possibilities.

Recognizing the importance of congressional action to enshrine protections for disabled workers before Trump takes office, the End Subminimum Wage Coalition has been pushing for the passage of the bipartisan Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act. The bill would eliminate subminimum wage for disabled people through the legislative process, making the protections more difficult to overturn than the proposed Department of Labor rule. In September, the coalition of more than 90 organizations wrote a letter urging Congress to pass the bill before the end of the year.

“When disabled people are instead given the appropriate accommodations and wraparound services, we often stop demonstrating the behaviors or characteristics that got us (mis)labeled as ‘low-functioning’ or ‘profoundly disabled’ to begin with,” the End Subminimum Wage Coalition wrote.

The letter also included personal testimonies from disabled people who were hired in subminimum wage jobs, such as an employee named Donna Spears, who worked at a 14(c) sheltered workshop in Louisiana for 38 dollars per month.

“Working for less than minimum wage took away my dignity.… I was humiliated when I learned that other workers were paid much more than me for the same work,” Spears wrote. “14(c) has to end.”