No Raise For You!
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Michelle Diament, Disability Scoop - January 31, 2014
To be honest, I held off posting about this for a few days, even though I think its hugely important, because I didn’t like any of the articles or blog posts about it. They tended to leave the impression that “all” disabled workers would miss out on the Minimum Wage raise for federal contract workers. It only applies to workers under the 14(c) exception to the federal Minimum Wage law. Not that it isn’t a terrible enough as it is, but we should remember that laypeople might actually be listening, and most of them don’t know anything about how disability issues like this work.
Anyhow, Disability Scoop has done a good job of summarizing this thing, and it’s update indicates that some heavy hitters are getting on the case. Frankly, I think that for the moment, this should be Issue #1 for the disability community … or those portions of it who are willing to scrap this stinking relic of a policy.
As a side note, Vice President Biden will apparently also be leading a review of all employment training programs, which I hope will include vocational rehabilitation. If it does, then he will probably end up dealing again with 14(c), which even traditional voc. rehab. is increasingly abandoning. I believe that in my home state of New York, voc. rehab. will still place some people in sheltered workshops, but won't consider such placements "successful closures", which is actually a pretty effective way to kill off the practice and combat the philosophy behind it.