Lots of media attention addresses the payment of subminimum wages to workers with disabilities employed in segregated workshops. In 2009, an Iowa Turkey farm was exposed for keeping dozens of men with intellectual disabilities in captivity for over thirty years, paying them $65 per month for decades of full-time manual labor. But a new study shows that programs trying to raise wages for workers with disabilities still place many in precarious, low-wage jobs due to the constraints of American disability policy.
I conducted eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in “Disability Works,” a state-funded nonprofit helping people with mental illnesses find employment. I worked alongside client-workers with mental illnesses in an on-site warehouse and shadowed workers on janitorial crews and in customer service roles, sat in on sessions between client-workers and their caseworkers, joined internal staff meetings and meetings with funders and other external agencies, and otherwise immersed myself in Disability Works’ daily operations.
Disability Works paid subminimum wages to a handful of workers in their on-site warehouse, but for the most part, they sought to transition away from segregated, low-wage employment and place workers in community-based jobs. However, two major policy regimes stood in their way: 1) disability benefits means-testing and 2) the strings attached to Disability Works’ government funding.
Disability Benefits
Most client-workers at Disability Works relied on some combination of Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and Medicaid to manage their disabilities. During my fieldwork, SSI benefits were capped at $783 per month, and SSDI benefits were typically around $1000 per month. In most places, that’s not enough to live on.
Therefore, many people with disabilities work to supplement their benefits. However, if their earnings or savings exceed caps established by the Social Security Administration, they can lose the benefits that they rely upon for medical care and other basic needs. Client-workers at Disability Works traded horror stories about their benefits being slashed.
Participants in my research needed to work to survive, but they sought part-time, low-wage jobs to keep their earnings below a level which would affect their benefits. For example, one client-worker told me,
“I would like a full-time job just because you can earn more money, but the thing is, I have Medicaid and if it goes over $1,400 a month, then it gets discontinued. So, in order to get Medicaid, keep getting Medicaid, I have to get a part-time job…I take medicines [for schizophrenia] and they’re expensive, so with Medicaid I get them for free.”
Disability benefits are designed to support people with unique medical and support needs, but these benefits must be supplemented with paid work. Yet strict earnings caps leave people with disabilities to populate the periphery of the labor market, as employment in stable, well-paying jobs may jeopardize benefits needed for survival. Therefore, I find that disability benefits produce disabled workers as a precarious labor force, despite the best efforts of social service nonprofits like Disability Works.
Government Contracts
Furthermore, Disability Works’ contracts with the government incentivize the placement of client-workers in temporary jobs. Disability Works and most organizations like it receive funds from the federal Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA). The RSA contract mandates that Disability Works achieve a high number of annual job placements.
To approach the RSA benchmarks, disability employment programs must place client-workers extremely quickly. Furthermore, client-workers who move from one temporary job to another count double toward contract requirements, so temporary placements are the most efficient way to meet RSA contract goals.
Caseworkers told me that the pressure to achieve rapid placements led them to push client-workers into temporary, low-wage, potentially dissatisfying jobs. Caseworkers place many client-workers in successive in-house internships in Disability Works’ in-house training programs. For instance, client-workers classified as “janitorial interns” clean local buildings on short-term janitorial contracts, which they may apply to renew after a few months.
These in-house programs’ classification as RSA placements are controversial. After decades of disability activism against segregated employment programs, the RSA requires job placements to be in “competitive jobs” to count toward contract goals. These requirements are part of the federal government push to eliminate segregated employment at subminimum wages.
However, these in-house placements may be the only way to approach the RSA’s unrealistic placement expectations. Therefore, before my research began, Disability Works banded together with a group of local disability employment programs to convince the local RSA branch to classify in-house work programs as competitive jobs. Beyond Disability Works, I’ve interviewed disability employment program managers all over the country engaged in similar lobbying efforts. Paradoxically, the RSA’s own efforts to eliminate precarious segregated employment end up incentivizing precarious segregated employment, because they set placement requirements at such a high level.
This study shows how the federal government push to eliminate the subminimum wage and sheltered employment is undercut by the federal government’s own mechanisms for distributing funds. Even as it attempts to transition away from the subminimum wage to competitive, living-wage employment, Disability Works places most people with mental illnesses in part-time, temporary, low-wage jobs.
Outcomes for People with Disabilities
Overall, the pressures of disability benefits means-testing and the RSA contract goals lead people with disabilities to cycle through one temporary, low-wage job after another. As one client-worker who reported over 100 temporary jobs in her life told me,
“We’re all underemployed. We’re all working as clerks and receptionists. I mean, some of us have law degrees. Somebody has an economics degree. I have an architecture degree. There was somebody who was a nurse. See, we’re all highly educated people, but for some reason, because of this so-called disability, we’re underemployed. Like for some reason it’s like a barrier or something…This is just to hold you over. This is better than having no job at all. This is just keeping busy. But there isn’t really a promise of a real job…They’re dead end jobs.”
Government policies produce workers with disabilities as a precarious labor force. Even if it’s not policymakers’ intention, these policies supply corporations with a pool of workers who will accept the contingent, poorly-paid positions characteristic of economic restructuring since the 1970s. Other studies show similar outcomes, with people with disabilities reporting fewer hours, lower wages, and more precarious positions across the board.
Disability employment policy is one factor in the rising economic inequality seen today. If policymakers want to promote stable, living-wage employment among people with disabilities, they must reform federal disability benefits and funding for disability employment programs.
Read More
Emily H. Ruppel. “Disability and the State Production of Precarity” in Work and Occupations 2023.
Image: Joe Piette via Flickr (CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0)