Privilege Denying Dude:
[Picture: Background: 8 piece pie style color split with red and teal alternating. Foreground: White guy with glasses and light shadow wearing a sweat shirt over a button down and short black hair. Has a smug, arrogant facial expression and crossed arms.
Top text: “ [People with learning disabilities] ” Bottom text: “ [should be paid less than minimum wage] ”]I don’t think this needs a trigger warning but unfortunatly,this is a political view here in England. http://www.communitycare.co.uk/blogs/adult-care-blog/2011/06/tory-mp-let-disabled-work-below-minimum-wage-to-gain-jobs.html I’m not even joking, I wish I was. The link contains the “logic” behind this including quotes from the original claims made by a conservative MP (our prime minister is conservative) that people, like myself, are “less productive” and therefore should be paid less in order to “help us”.
I don’t think I even need to point out everything that is wrong with this, the exploitation that will result is apparent even to my less productive brain.
SO:
This is a UK story, and what is called learning disabilities in the UK covers at least intellectual disability and possibly some other disabilities in the USA.
This exists in the USA already in the form of sheltered workshops and has for years.
Also the bolded.
this is terrifying and disgusting wow
Yep. I really am surprised more people don’t know or care. Like, great, boycott the Salvation Army because they’re cissexist and heterosexist. Yes, do! But don’t you dare say Goodwill is a good company/ a good alternative when they pay disabled workers just PENNIES per hour. Don’t you fucking DARE.
It has been legal to pay people with disabilities subminimum wages since the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938. Specifically, for more than seventy years Section 14(c) of the FLSA has allowed the secretary of labor to grant special wage certificates to entities that provide employment to workers with disabilities, permitting them to pay their disabled workers at rates that are lower than the federal minimum wage and excluding people with disabilities from the workforce protection of the federal minimum wage enjoyed by all other Americans.
Employed in a publicly funded sheltered workshop in Beaverton, Ore., Paula Lane has earned as little as 40 cents an hour. Lane, who has autism and an anxiety disorder, works with 100 other people with mental and physical disabilities.
Sheltered workshops hire people with disabilities to do simple labor, such as folding bags, packaging gloves, and shredding paper. The only nondisabled people the workers interact with are staff and managers. Their jobs don’t offer training for advancement, and environments can be noisy, crowded, and hazardous.
While promoted as stepping stones to mainstream employment, these ghettoized workplaces are often nothing more than sweatshops. The National Disability Rights Network (NDRN) published a scathing critique, called “Segregated and Exploited: the Failure of the Disability Service System to Provide Quality Work.” The report said that these job sites “have replaced institutions in many states as the new warehousing system,” one that “keeps people with disabilities in the shadows.”
Reblogging for the story as well as the bold and the above comments; this kind of thing isn’t new in the US. Being someone with a disability I had a job for a few months at a workshop exactly matching the above description, that was the only place who would hire me, and I made on average about $2.50 an hour. It was supposed to be a sliding rate based on how much work you got done but it was a regular occurrence for them to chastise us for “working too fast”, take away our working materials, and make everyone sit out the clock for up to hours at a time doing nothing even when there was still a long list of work to be done.
I almost ended up homeless recently in fact, because the landlord of the apartment I was living in at the time raised my rent by more than I was actually making even working full time, because, well, I had a full time job so I must have been making enough. And when I went to the town’s (notoriously ableist, of all the irony) caseworker about it and expressed wanting to quit, I was condescended to about how I clearly just don’t want to work and that by wanting to quit I’m just showing that I’ll never be ready for real employment because I’m cheating myself of all the program has to offer in “job skills training” (which was completely nonexistent). It was like pulling teeth to get him to have any communication at all with my psychiatric folks or my landlord or my boss or anything else and I’m fairly certain he had a coke problem. When I finally did quit he was nasty and insulting as hell and put down that they fired me for just not showing up for the following two weeks without any notice, rather than formally resigned with acknowledgement from the workshop, and refused to change it so that my state records don’t say I deserted.
There was a lot of talk from the managers and higher-ups and caseworkers about how the entire point of the program is to help people find and prepare for better jobs and all that they might entail, but then when you go in they put you to work doing manual labor or boxing up packs of screws or putting assembly touches on industrial clamps or what have you and afterwards there’s little to no interaction with people who aren’t fellow employees. They teach you how to do those specific assembly jobs and that’s about it. On top of that, at least half of the people there (possibly more) had been there for a period of years without ever having anything change. It smells like something alright.
My point is, these places aren’t what they seem and as long as people keep giving them the right-on because they think they’re making vast improvements to people’s lives, nothing is going to change and these folks will continue to step on the disabled. And since a lot of therapists and psychiatrists do a whole lot of referrals to these places without knowing how they operate, something needs to be done.