We all keep hearing about this “labor shortage,” where employers are scrambling to find workers to fill millions of vacant positions. It’s usually the other way around, where millions of workers are stomping all over each other in hot pursuit of crappy, low-wage jobs.
But there’s not a dearth of workers. There’s a dearth of exploitable workers. The pandemic has hit us like a collective near-death experience. It’s prompted many people to realize that there’s a whole lot more to life than burning up all of their time and energy slogging away at low-wage jobs. If they can avoid getting sucked up in that undertow again, they will.
This poses a serious threat to the capitalist system, which feeds on a bottomless supply of powerless wretches.
Many disabled people exhibit the characteristic that a lot of employers cherish the most: We’re desperate.
Some governors think the way to address this is to make the workers in their state exploitable again. Twenty-six of them have ended or will soon end their state’s participation in the federal program that gives people who are out of work an extra $300 a week in unemployment payments. (Spoiler alert: twenty-five of these governors are republicans.)
That certainly ought to give workers a lot less negotiating leverage. But I have a more long-term solution for the bosses. They need to realize that a vast, untapped reservoir of highly exploitable workers has been out there for a long time, right under their noses.
I’m talking about disabled folks.
Some people have been hollering for decades about how employers in the United States ought to hire more disabled people. Maybe this shortage of exploitable workers will scare the bosses enough for them to finally take heed.
In fact, many disabled people exhibit the characteristic that a lot of employers cherish the most: We’re desperate.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate of disabled folks was 12.6 percent in 2020, as compared to 7.9 percent for those who aren’t disabled.
And those who advocate for employment of the disabled love to point to all of the evidence that shows that our absentee rates are lower and our retention rates are higher than those of workers who aren’t disabled. We’re loyal and reliable, because we have to be. When we finally land a job, we don’t want to screw around and risk losing it.
Disabled workers aren’t all that demanding when it comes to pay, either. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau says that as a group, full-time, year-round workers with a disability earn 87 cents for every dollar earned by those with no disability.
And then there’s Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, a law that, since 1938, has allowed some employers to legally get away with paying some disabled workers way less than even the puny federal minimum wage.
First, the employer has to apply for minimum wage exemption for a disabled worker from the U.S. Department of labor, based on an assessment of that worker’s perceived reduced productivity. But once that exemption is granted, there is no limit to how little the employer can pay, and there have been reports of disabled people working for pennies per hour.
So let’s say, for instance, that there’s a company that manufactures signs that say “WILL WORK FOR FOOD.” They might well be able to get disabled people to make those signs, for food.