Labor Exploitation in America
I remember during the spring semester, going out with my friends to raise awareness about labor conditions in other countries. I remember talking to people about how workers in other countries are paid far less than minimum wage, sometimes only pennies on the dollar. I remember my physical disgust when I would think about the fact that this type of exploitative labor doesn't only happen in other countries, it happens here too. It happens here, and it's not considered slavery or exploitation. It happens here, and is 100% legal, as long as the person you are employing has a disability. It happens here and nobody knows.
How can this be? Don't we have a minimum wage? It's a loophole. Aren't there always loopholes? It has to do with something called Sheltered Workshops, designed to encourage businesses to employ severely disabled individuals, oftentimes at subminimum wages, sometimes as little as $.22 an hour. You must be thinking "they can't really be having these people do real jobs, and paying them that little." But I promise you they are. At businesses such as Goodwill, disabled employees are making as little as $.22 an hour while CEOs make up to $1.1 million a year.
What disgusts me even more is how they decide on these wages. People's wages are decided by time tests every six months. This means that somebody stands over you with a stopwatch and decides what you will get paid based on how fast you do your work. Excuse me but what? How discriminatory! What a ridiculous standard! Nobody would stand over my sister with a stopwatch and decide that her work was worth less than minimum wage, but they could do it to me. What are we teaching people with those kinds of standards?
How can we ever expect people's attitudes about disability and disabled people to change when we legally allow some disabled individuals to be paid sweatshop wages? There is no justification for this. Don't tell me they're being paid for the work they can do, or something else like that. We have a minimum wage for a reason. It is not a universal practice to time people at their jobs and pay their wages based on some arbitrary determination of what is fast enough. That is only done to disabled people. That is done to humiliate and degrade disabled workers. This practice is a constant reminder that disabled workers will never be seen as equally as valuable as nondisabled workers.
It's not about quality, it's about speed, which is inherently ablest. I may not be able to do something as fast as everybody else, but that doesn't mean I can't do it as well or better. What if we timed all workers? Would businesses be willing to cut the wages of non-disabled workers to pennies per hour? I doubt it. So why are they willing to do it to disabled workers?
There has been some light shed on this practice as of late, and I am glad for that, but what must be understood is that this is not new. It is going on today, but it has been going on for a long time and it is legal. In my mind, it shouldn't be. In my mind, it slavery, and I am in it to end it.