Some workers with disabilities are legally paid twenty-five cents per hour. Last December, the federal government took action to finally do away with an outdated provision of a labor law that makes these subminimum wages legal, but the administration of the squatter who is currently occupying the White House seems determined to ensure that nothing changes and no progress is made.
Trying to get by while working a job that pays the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is nearly impossible. At that paltry wage, even if you work forty hours a week for fifty-two weeks, you’ll still earn only about $16,000 a year.
But people with disabilities can legally be paid even less than that—way less. According to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), more than 40,000 disabled workers are currently being paid less than the federal minimum wage. Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 makes that all possible. According to this provision, if an employer can convince the DOL that the disabilities of certain workers make them less productive than the average employee, the employer can obtain a certificate from the agency allowing them to pay a lower wage. Disabled workers under 14(c) certificates are paid an average of $3.34 an hour.
There has been a lot of clamor throughout recent years for the federal government to do away with that provision. On December 4, the DOL published a proposed rule in the Federal Register that would require the agency to immediately stop granting employers new permissions to pay disabled workers less than the federal minimum wage, and to terminate all existing permissions within three years. The proposed rule noted that “fifteen states have laws that prohibit or are in the process of prohibiting subminimum wage payments, and an additional nine states have limited or restrained the payment of subminimum wages.”
When a federal agency publishes a proposed rule in the Federal Register, the agency then invites the public to submit comments on the proposal by a given deadline. The agency’s staff members then review and consider all comments before amending the rule, withdrawing it, or finalizing and publishing it as is. This can become a very long and drawn out process because there are sometimes thousands of comments for staff to review. The DOL proposal garnered nearly 18,000 comments.
The problem is that the deadline for submitting comments was January 17—when Joe Biden was still President. But on January 20, the squatter moved back into the White House, leaving the fate of the proposed rule up to his administration. And on July 7, the DOL issued a notice stating that the agency was immediately withdrawing the proposed rule due to concerns about the agency’s “lack of legal authority to tear down what Congress has mandated” in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. “The Department takes seriously the concerns expressed by Members of Congress and others that it lacks statutory authority to unilaterally and permanently terminate the issuance of section 14(c) certificates,” the notice states.
That’s ironic, considering that the squatter has repeatedly thumbed his nose at the separation of powers and checks and balances any time he finds them to be standing in his way. Well, this labor law is just another way in which he wants to take us all back to the 1930s.