I'm not sure what the original intent of the 1938 law was, or how it's being abused now, but I did participate in an organization that helped the severely mentally handicapped. The charity provided them with a place to stay (a house in a neighborhood with neighbors, not an institution) including 24/7 care for things like helping with medications, cleaning, etc. Part of the program was that they spent some time each week (definitely not 40 hours) in a work environment (in our case, packing plastic bags into boxes for Johnson and Johnson), also fully supervised by caretakers.

Johnson and Johnson certainly weren't making out on the deal, given the limitations of the work that could realistically get done versus what a non-disabled employee would be able to do. I suspect the whole program was more headache and expense than they saved. In other words, the point was not for these people to earn enough money to support themselves (their housing, meals, clothes, were taken care of), and only partially about earning some spending money (there was already a budget for that too, things like movie tickets, coffee at Tim Hortons, etc), but more trying to lead a normal life -- seeing peers at work, waving to the other workers in the plant, going to the company barbecue, etc.

Again, I'm basically 100% sure that abuses exist of this provision, but I would really like to see any reform done in such a way that it doesn't eliminate programs like this.

They have a similar law in New Zealand, but there is a debate around abolishing it so that disabled people would have to be paid normal minimum wage.

The flip side to this was that a whole bunch of workers basically stood to be made redundant, because the companies employing them could't afford to pay them minimum wage. The reason that a lot of companies were hiring these people was a as community service.

The coworking space I used to work at does this. They have a special needs guy who is the community assistant, he'd come in like 3 days a week and help with keeping the kitchen clean and other stuff. It was great, we loved him and he loved being there. It would've been cheaper and easier to hire a fully-abled person to do the job, but that's not why they hired him.

It's common for supermarkets in New Zealand to hire people with learning disabilities to do things like collecting trolleys. To be honest, they look like the most satisfied employees in the whole store.

The sad thing though is that people do abuse the system and use them as a cheap source of labour, which is disgusting.

That's totally disgusting. Not only do they start out with a bad hand, this is then used to exploit them with the blessings of the government.

The idea is to offset a bias against hiring them. But ideally in these situations taxes would fill the gap, justified as having the disabled in the workforce keeps them off welfare programs

They often advertise themselves as providing opportunities (and ask for donations and such).

There is certainly great potential for exploitation, but many such operations do provide opportunities that would not otherwise exist.

Maybe you should educate yourself more before posting full of outrage.

A good place to start would be in the other comments in this thread.

But I'll summarize for you: The companies are only hiring them as a community service. They cost more than a regular person and do less. Force companies to pay full wage, and they won't hire them at all. Even at the lower wage it's not really worth it to them.

Maybe they shouldn't bother, since people like you interpret helping people as exploiting them......

As an employer I've hired disabled people more than once, and in fact am about to do this again in the coming 30 days.

They didn't cost a penny more than their able bodied brothers and sisters to employ. And they got paid just the same amount that other people did in that job.

Besides that a friend of mine ran a whole courier company with nothing but disabled people. All of those got paid full wages as well.

I'm sure there are boundary cases where it can turn into community service but this sounds - with the details available - as exploitation to me.

For European employers if there would be compensation this would be done at the back-end between the companies and the government, no way would the 'minimum wage' be reduced simply because someone is disabled. As if an hour of work by a disabled person is somehow worth less than an hour of work by an able-bodied person doing the same job. You'd have to get into extremes of lack of productivity before you could justify the 'pennies per hour' posted here.

Then, finally: there are institutions here called social workshops. In those places there is a cross between real work and therapy, work that is extremely simple and that basically anybody could do. For those places the people that work there tend to get compensation but it is not at the level of an actual wage. The thing is that the state already pays them a full social security or disability allowance which takes the place of a salary. Anything above that (such as through this work) is a special arrangement, they are not expected to earn a living wage by themselves.

I hope that all this shows you that I've educated myself sufficiently.

Wow, you haven't educated yourself at all. You haven't even read the article linked in this conversation. If you had read it, you would have come across the enormous similarities between this program and the social workshops that you describe. Here, since you haven't bothered to read it

> Most people making subminimum wages, like Chris Wilson, work in factorylike settings known as sheltered workshops, which are supervised workplaces for people with disabilities. Workers package and assemble products, for example, sometimes folding paper, making jewelry, or sorting mail.

The subminimum wage is only allowed for people who are unable to work at normal levels of productivity because of their disability - in other words, it doesn't apply to people with a disability who can produce an hour of work that's worth the same as an able-bodied person doing the same job. (Also worth noting that 'able-bodied' is an odd word to use in this context, most of the people in this program would have an intellectual disability, not a physical one.) For your further education, here's an article that contains some examples of how this is measured:

> For example, if an average worker loads 100 boxes in an hour, but the worker being tested loads 15, that worker could be assigned a wage that is 15 percent of the average worker’s, or $2.25 an hour, rather than Seattle’s $15 minimum wage. ... > With a supervisor, the six workers complete the amount of work that would normally be done by two people.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/puget-sound/seattl...

Don’t they receive disability assistance money as well though?

Only if they make less than a certain amount.

Why is minimum wage fair, and why is it better for people with disabilities severe enough that no one wants to pay them above minimum wage to not earn anything?

The idea is that some people with disabilities are going to be unable to find work where they can produce value higher the federal or state minimum wage. It’s possible such work exists, but maybe not where they live or maybe not in something they’re trained in. A job is better than no job, for more reasons than just money. Work gives people the feeling of earning their way, like they are valuable to others in their own right.

Whether such a policy is actually fair depends on specific empirical facts, not some a priori judgment. You’d need to know the economics of labor by people with different disabilities, the ability of companies to accommodate those disability, and so forth.