Minimum wage exemption.

• Author: Couch, George
• Position: Letters to the Editor - Letter to the editor

The article "Exploiting the 'Handicap Wage' " (by Mike Ervin, March issue) does a disservice to my adult daughter and other men and women with severe disabilities by suggesting that the way to deal with abuse of the federal minimum wage exemption for people with disabilities is to phase out the exemption completely.

If every government program that has been exploited were to be abolished, we would be without Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and flood insurance, to name just a few.

A more suitable solution, one that recognizes the importance of the exemption to thousands of men and women with severely limiting disabilities, is to improve safeguards and monitoring.

Yes, the wage exemption permitted by Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act has been abused. The two-year-old example cited in the article is certainly egregious. But the important fact is that authorities shut the operation down within days of learning of the abuse.

Many who identify themselves as "disability rights activists," such as author Ervin, fail to acknowledge that people...