Are Differential Wages for the Disabled Discriminatory?

Today, The Atlantic ran an article on workers with disabilities and the sub-minimum wage.

Honestly, before reading it I didn’t even know this was an issue. In a nutshell:

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), section 14(c) allows employers who hire individuals with disabilities to pay them less than the minimum wage. According to the article, 14(c) was originally designed to provide an incentive for companies in industrial sectors to hire disabled veterans after the First World War. Today, the program is used to employ individuals with a range of disabilities who might not otherwise be able to hold down a traditional job.

However, organizations such as the Disability Rights Network and the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network argue that paying these workers less than minimum wage is an antiquated idea which demeans people with disabilities and creates perverse incentives to exploit their labor.

Hillary Clinton recently called attention to the issue on the campaign trail:

When it comes to jobs, we’ve got to figure out how we get the minimum wage up and include people with disabilities in the minimum wage. There should not be a tiered wage, and right now there is a tiered wage when it comes to facilities that do provide opportunities but not at a self-sufficient wage that enables people to gain a degree of independence as far as they can go. So I want us to take a hard look at raising the minimum wage and ending the tiered minimum wages, whether it’s for people with disabilities or the tipped wage….When people talk about raising the minimum wage, they don’t always talk about the legal loopholes that we have in it and I want to get rid of those and I want to get rid of that for people with disabilities too.

At first, I reacted to this article in roughly the way I think its author and the advocates quoted within it wanted me to – with outrage and empathy. However, once I did a few minutes’ research on the regulations surrounding the sub-minimum wage and talked to a few friends with experience on the issue, a more complicated picture emerged.

In my opinion, this article is misleading, and it and Secretary Clinton are advocating for the wrong solution to a real problem.