LABORING UNDER DISCRIMINATION: Seventeen states have taken steps to phase out subminimum wages, but Ohio isn't one of them.

• Author: Stetler, Pepper

When Jan Dougherty's son, Ryan, graduated from high school in Canton, Ohio, in 2002, school counselors and vocational rehabilitation providers told her that the only place he belonged was a sheltered workshop.

"We were told Ryan didn't belong in the community," Dougherty says. Ryan, who is autistic, was considered "too disabled" to work.

When it was passed in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) established a federal minimum wage, guidelines for overtime pay, and child labor restrictions. It also created 14(c) certificates that permit employers to pay people with disabilities less than the minimum wage. According to a 2020 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Americans with disabilities earn on average less than half of the federal minimum wage per hour. In October 2022, at least 70,000 people with disabilities were working for 14(c) certificate holders, earning less than the minimum wage.

But the report also highlighted a lack of data regarding the practice. Neil Romano, chair of the National Council on Disability, told the commission during testimony, "We collect data on things we view as important, and historically, we just don't count people with disabilities."

The number of people working in sheltered workshops for subminimum wage has steadily decreased in recent years. But the full elimination of 14(c) certificates has been slow, meeting resistance from vocational rehabilitation service providers that still view sheltered workshops as a justifiable system of employment for people with disabilities.

The Department of Labor explains the purpose of 14(c) certificates with a rhetoric of benevolent protection. It claims that they "prevent curtailment of opportunities for employment" for people whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury, in order to justify low pay and segregated workplaces.

The 14(c) certificates are a holdover from an unjust moment in the early twentieth century, when people with disabilities were isolated from mainstream life, ostensibly for their own protection and shelter. But today, 14(c) certificates are in conflict with the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law in 1990, which asserts that disability is a natural part of the human experience that does not diminish a persons right to participate in all aspects of life, including work.

The 14(c) certificates also contradict the U.S. Supreme Courts 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C., which...