I’M STILL CURIOUS: I’m not usually accused on believing in conspiracy theories. I’m more likely to be the one chastising my friends for believing them. And yet … for years, I’ve wondered why suddenly the disability rights groups were knocking themselves out to fight special minimum wage laws applicable to severely disabled persons. Who was bankrolling all this? My guess at the time was the SEIU. I’d still like to know … but I suppose there’s a good chance I never will.
Under very limited circumstances, Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standard Act permits individuals with severe disabilities (think Down Syndrome) to accept employment from certain specially licensed and regulated businesses that are allowed to pay less than the minimum wage. The program is strictly optional. If an individual with Down Syndrome can find an employer willing to pay bigger bucks, then more power to him.
The program is very popular with the parents and family members of severely disabled individuals. When the Commission on Civil Rights did a report on this issue in 2020, we received about 9,700 comments from the parents and other family members. That was a record number for us. Almost all of them argued strongly in favor of Section 14(c). The Commission nevertheless sided with the disability rights folks and called for the program’s elimination.
I dissented, figuring the parents and other family members knew more about what was good for their loved ones than the disability rights folks. The family members certainly knew that without 14(c) there would be no jobs at all for most Down Syndrome sufferers. Not too many Down Syndrome sufferers get jobs as engineers at Google, Apple, or Tesla. The disability rights advocates who testified before the Commission brought along a young man with Down Syndrome who testified that he wanted a more challenging job and would prefer a job where he could carry a briefcase to the office like his father. We were evidently supposed to nod and pretend that this man’s hope was a realistic option for Down Syndrome sufferers generally.
Nevertheless, the disability rights advocates were pulling out all stops to get rid of the law. They were lobbying state legislatures around the country to override it with a state provision that requires minimum wage. And they were succeeding in getting the programs phased out.
As part of the report, we interviewed the Commissioner at the Vermont Department of Disabilities, Aging, and Independent Living, where 14(c) workshops were being done away with. She admitted that the jobs had disappeared. Instead, the state (with taxpayer money) was providing “minders” to keep these now-jobless individuals entertained.
I got the feeling that creating state-funded jobs for the “minders”—who might then join a union like the SEIU—was the central feature not a bug in this plan. Chris Rufo and Kenneth Scrupp have been writing about this kind of cycle: At the union’s behest, left-wing politicians fund programs that employ large numbers of low-skilled employees, who in turn join the union, which in turn donates big bucks to the left-wing politicians. Government gets bigger and bigger. Maybe the controversy over the Section 14(c) is another example of this.
