The Department of Labor announced on Monday that it will continue a program that allows tens of thousands of disabled workers to hold jobs that pay less than the federal minimum wage. Previously, under President Biden, the department had proposed a rule that would have ended applications for the exemption — authorized under section 14(c) of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act — and required current participants to shut down their programs within three years.
The Trump administration has now withdrawn that rule, arguing that “individuals with significant disabilities would face unemployment, underemployment, or loss of ancillary services if 14(c) options were eliminated.”
The Washington Post describes how disability advocates had fought for the Biden-era change, as they alleged that the 14(c) program “devalues the work of people with disabilities and limits the types of work they can do.” But those advocates “faced fierce pushback from a small cohort of well-organized defenders of the law, including some parents of disabled workers, who argue that for some, this program is their only opportunity to do meaningful work and earn a wage.”
Indeed, many people with severe disabilities are not productive enough to make paying them $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum wage, economically viable. But that reality does not make their work meaningless. Beneficiaries of the 14(c) program often work alongside one another doing uncomplicated tasks that add real value nonetheless: sorting paperwork, packaging chocolates, moving hangers. The places that specially hire them — called “sheltered workshops” — often become communities in themselves, where employees get to experience the purpose and dignity that a stable job provides if they so choose.
Forcing employers to pay higher wages than their workers can justify, as the Biden administration tried to do, would effectively abolish those spaces. Would the 35,000 disabled individuals who use the program be better off with no job at all, at a wage of zero dollars an hour? If so, why did they elect to take a job offered below the minimum wage in the first place?
A long-running criticism of minimum wage laws is that they disadvantage the most vulnerable members of society by prohibiting employers from paying them what their labor is worth. That is especially true of the disabled. A recent Cato Institute study finds that state-level increases in the minimum wage “significantly reduce employment and labor force participation for individuals of all working ages with severe disabilities.” Those who no longer work end up receiving “zero dollars in wages” and relying upon more public assistance. That is benevolent government’s idea of helping a vulnerable population.
Other well-intentioned government efforts to help disabled workers have borne similar results. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), for instance, was passed in 1990 to mandate standards of “reasonable accommodations” for disabled workers. But these requirements made it far costlier to hire employees with disabilities. Another study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that employment rates for the disabled “fell sharply after the ADA,” in a “clear break from past trends” that “seems likely to have been caused by the ADA.” Meanwhile, the authors found “little evidence of an impact on the nondisabled, suggesting that the adverse employment consequences of the ADA have been limited to the protected group.” That’s some “protection.”
Those who defend the program that the Trump administration is preserving say they’re fighting for “employment choice,” a concept foreign to many progressives. Kit Brewer, who runs a 14(c) employer for disabled workers in Missouri, told the Post that he sees “his operation as a ‘safety net’ for individuals who have struggled to make the transition to competitive integrated employment, and argued that the program served a ‘particular niche’ of the disability community.” Brewer — and now the Trump administration, too — believes that America is made better when its most severely disabled citizens are at least able to come to work like everyone else.