Sheltered Workshops and the Slavery of Disabled Workers

I feel strongly about the working conditions of America’s disabled workers, because I am a disabled person myself. I was born totally visually impaired. My goal is to form the American Federation of Disabled Workers to ensure minimum wage, safer conditions, health retirement and other benefits, and that disabled workers are treated as equals just like every other working American. My goal in forming this union will be to ensure the voice of all disabled workers whether they are physically or mentally disabled. Yes, some might not agree with unions, but this one has a unique purpose. There would be advocates for those disabled workers that can not speak on their own to ensure their well-being and fair treatment and to make sure they have a choice in what they do with their life. My first steps in accomplishing this will be to research the issues facing America’s disabled workers today. My goal in publishing this essay is to bring public awareness to this issue and get more people to speak out about what is happening to America's disabled workers.

One of these issues that mean the most to me is minimum wage for disabled workers. Currently there is a law that allows certain employers to pay disabled workers far below minimum wage and by piece rate. This I believe is extremely wrong especially in the United States. This is total slave labor and exploitation, and could fall under child labor laws because some of the mentally disabled working in these sheltered workshops are at the mental age of twelve or under. My first step was to research the issue, and here is what I have so far. My plan after this step is to become a volunteer in the local sheltered workshop to actually get the view of the workers there and interview them and see what can be done.

We as disabled people should have a choice on how and where we work. We need to use our voices and speak out and speak up for those that are unable. We as disabled people should be able to work and live in our own communities and not be segregated from everyone else in disabled only places of employment.


Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) allows entities holding what are called “special wage certificates” to pay their disabled workers less than the federal minimum wage. These entities are almost always segregated workplaces, sometimes called “sheltered workshops,” that employ workers with various disabilities, including sensory, physical, and cognitive or developmental disabilities. Federal law requires that certain goods and services procured by the federal government be purchased from these sheltered workshops in order to provide workers with disabilities with employment, but these workers do not have the same protections that other American workers have. Most importantly they do not receive the federal minimum wage. In recent times some of these sheltered workshops have begun to pay disabled workers the minimum wage or higher. Because they receive very lucrative federal contracts, even those workshops that are paying workers competitive wages have no trouble maintaining their operations and even being quite profitable. But some shops still claim that they would be unable to continue their operations and would have to fire their workers with disabilities if forced to pay the minimum wage, even though this claim is demonstrably false.

In 1973 Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act, and in 1990 the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. Both of these laws are designed to help workers with disabilities obtain competitive employment outside of these sheltered workshops.

The Current Issue

A bill before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (commonly called the HELP Committee), the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), contains language in Title V reauthorizing the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. A new section of this title, Section 511, allows rehabilitation agencies, which are supposed to place workers with disabilities in competitive employment, to place workers in sheltered workshops that pay subminimum wages instead, under certain circumstances. The Rehabilitation Act has never before endorsed or been linked to the payment of subminimum wages.

Sheltered Workshops and the Subminimum Wage: What Goes Around Comes Around

by James Gashel









The report from the National Disability Rights Network paints a glum picture of the jobs held by many Americans with disabilities that pay less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. In it, the authors charge that the segregated environments people with disabilities often work in are akin to institutions by “warehousing” people, limiting their opportunities and putting them in danger of abuse and neglect, all while providing financial gain for employers, some of whom earn six-figure salaries.

“For decades we have worked to ensure federal laws guarantee the right of people with disabilities to live and work in their chosen communities,” said Curt Decker, executive director of the National Disability Rights Network, an umbrella group for the protection and advocacy organizations in each state, which produced the report. “Yet, our investigation found that many people with disabilities are still being segregated and financially exploited.”


However, government oversight of employers to ensure that workers are paid appropriately is limited, the report found, leaving the door open for abuse given that many workers are not able to speak up for themselves.

What’s more, while sheltered workshops are typically billed as providing job training, the report authors argue there’s little opportunity for people to transfer into competitive employment since the skills they’re taught frequently have little application elsewhere. And the low pay workers receive — often just 50 percent of the minimum wage — keeps people in a cycle of poverty.

“Sheltered workshops are often celebrated for providing an altruistic service to their communities,” the report says. “In reality they provide workers with disabilities with dead-end jobs, meager wages and the glimpse of a future containing little else.”

Sheltered Workshops No Better Than Institutions, Report Finds

By Michelle Diament

Segregated and Exploited:

Many are asking, “What will happen to those with disabilities who are currently employed under these special subminimum wage certificates?” The real question to be answered is, “What should happen to those people with disabilities currently being exploited under this unjust provision?”

The fundamental fallacy is in considering subminimum-wage work as true employment. The entities that engage in this practice are not employers. They are daycare providers for people with disabilities, offering days filled only with repetitive drudgery for sometimes third-world wages and leading nowhere for their workers but toward despair and greater dependence on social programs and public assistance. Imprisoning these workers in this adult daycare environment keeps them from acquiring the necessary training and opportunity to identify the skills or job that could lead to their competitive, integrated employment at the federal minimum wage or higher. If social supports are necessary for some of these people to sustain themselves, then society should be developing methods that will make it possible for them to gain real skills, to identify appropriate jobs, and to contribute in a meaningful way to the system that supports them.

Many of these sheltered workshops could be more accurately described as prisons, albeit without bars, than as actual workplaces. The data show that fewer than 5 percent of the prisoners escape. This means that 95 percent of the people currently toiling in subminimum-wage work will spend their entire working lives in these facilities. They will never receive the needed services, training, or support to become real workers, doing real jobs, and earning real wages.

We must eliminate this legalized wage discrimination in order to shift the paradigm from one maintaining that people with disabilities cannot perform jobs competitively to one that recognizes that, with the proper training, opportunity, and supports, even people with the most significant disabilities can be competitively employed—contributing to an employer's bottom line and adding value to the American economy.

"Rather than adopting a new business model that values each employee by paying at least the federal minimum wage, other employers prefer to continue exploiting the productivity of workers with disabilities. In addition to artificially padding profits by exploiting subminimum-wage labor, these entities generate further revenue through soliciting philanthropic donations and obtaining federal funding. It should be obvious that any business unable to remain lucrative with public and private money constantly flowing into its coffers while paying the employees at least the federal minimum wage should not be in business at all. The failure of such an entity is likely to be the result of poor management, not the payment of competitive wages or the incapacity of its workers with disabilities. Such shoddy operations should not be subsidized by a federal law that allows them to exploit workers with disabilities by using them as a fundraising resource, as a justification for the lavishing of federal largesse, and as sweatshop laborers."

"just like every other American citizen. Rather than allowing the labor of people with disabilities to be devalued, America needs to incentivize the development of the progressive employment tools, strategies, and supports that make it possible for every American citizen, regardless of disability, to earn a fair wage. Congress must pass the Fair Wages for People with Disabilities Act."

NDRN Report Shines Light on Exploitation of Disabled

By Janine Bertram Kemp


The National Disability Rights Network released a groundbreaking report in January that has evoked a volatile reaction in many quarters. The report, "Segregated and Exploited: The Failure of the Disability Service System to Provide Quality Work," is NDRN’s call to action.

The report documents abuses at Henry’s Turkey Farm in Atalissa, Iowa, in 2009 and 2010. Sixty men with disabilities, who worked alongside non-disabled workers, lived together in a roach-infested, abandoned school-turned-bunkhouse. Henry’s paid $600 per month for use of the tax-free bunkhouse and deducted $10,000 a week from the disabled men’s checks, according to a story in the Des Moines Register.

Each of the disabled workers averaged a net pay of 41 cents per hour, while co-workers without disabilities averaged $9 to $12 per hour. Because Henry’s Turkey Farm was also landlord and “caretaker” for the workers with disabilities, the farm received the men's Social Security checks and took deductions for such things as housing and transportation. As a result, the disabled workers took home about $65 per month.

According to the NDRN, exploitation and abuse of people with disabilities continues in the segregated settings of sheltered workshops and “training centers” throughout the nation.

Here is a piece from the prospective of a disabled worker at one of the several sheltered workshops here in the States:

If you think slavery in the United States has come to an end, think again.

Slavery is defined as a system in which people are the property of others. Consider this: If each person with a disability was a beautiful acre of land, then it is accurate to say that many of these “acres” are taken over because of “manifest destiny.”

Manifest destiny was a term used in the 1840s to justify this country’s taking of land -- such as Oregon, California and Texas -- because, it was said, the white man’s right to the property was inspired by God and democracy and good will. It was claimed that, somehow, the white man held a higher station in life than Native Americans, a notion that is best described, as TV’s Archie Bunker said, as “crapola.” Once taken over, a person with a disability becomes disenfranchised, a word that means “being denied the right of citizenship.” That is slavery.

Manifest destiny, then and now, is nothing more than an excuse to step over and on anyone and anything that stands in the way of greed and lust for power. It is inflicted on many of us who live with disabilities. Our lives and our rights are taken over and controlled by others, usually to benefit big business. We are dictated to and controlled and restricted in a wide variety of ways. That is slavery.

We are told where to live, what to eat (there is not a plethora of menu choices in community-based programs or institutions), what transportation we can use, where we can work, for whom we can work, where we can vote and so forth. That is slavery.

Many of us are sent to sheltered workshops and paid slave-labor wages. The companies running sheltered workshops are not obligated to pay minimum wage. That is slavery.

I read one definition of a sheltered workshop that said, “The word ‘sheltered’ refers to a protective environment where the disabled can undertake paid meaningful employment in a supportive environment.” Again, that is crapola. In the real world, these sugar-coated words (sugar has been called cancer’s Cadillac, so sugar isn’t such a good thing in the first place) actually mean “we’re going to send you to do some mind-bendingly boring work, pay you pennies and make money off you and -- oh, yeah -- this has meaning to you.” That is slavery.

I believe after researching this issue that these places need to be either closed down for good or these disabled people who work at such places should have a voice. They need to have a union that will ensure fair treatment, and right now this is an example of extremely unfair labor practices. This is going on all around the country in every state and city. There needs to be a change, and the change needs to start now. Disabled people deserve minimum wage just like every other American.

Disabled people, you have a voice, use it! Are you scared? Well come on! Don't let them make you afraid. You know what's right; you and only you know what's best for you and your life. You have to come to understand that or people will walk all over you like they walk on sidewalks. If something's not right about your life, it’s you who can change it. Don't let people intimidate you and make you feel little. Think of yourself as just a pile of sticks, never let them break you!

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