This is disgustingly ableist. Disabled people have worth, their labor has value, they’re working just like everyone else so they should get paid as much as everyone else. Why are we debating this??? It’s common sense!
I’m so salty about this i have to reblog it again. WE’RE TALKING ABOUT A HUMAN BEING WORKING FOR A LIVING. NO YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO PAY THEM LOWER THAN MINIMUM WAGE. WHAT THE FUCK.
workers of the world, be against this shit in particular
if someone is ‘allowed’ to work for less than minimum wage, they will be forced to work for less than minimum wage.
i just found out our cleaners make below min wage, and are paid different amounts according to how much they can do…
yet another fucked up thing about your building management, jeez
i wonder if we can pester the city about that
Iirc that is actually how subminimum wage works. It’s based on the idea that a disabled worker is less productive than a nondisabled one, so they only get paid a portion of the money, based on their productivity compared to the standard.
Yeah that is generally how it works I think.
I have no idea how they would measure that either like, I feel like some of the “lack of productivity” is “we are too lazy to accommodate you so you can work at normal speed even if it’s literally GIVING YOU A STOOL or something that costs us basically nothing so here’s some spare change”.
Mm, I do think it’s possible for disability to affect productivity. I just don’t think “not paying people minimum wage” is a solution to that issue.
I’d like to have a better understanding of this issue. The disabled people that I’ve known to be involved in work programs, they weren’t hirable by regular employers, and they were not capable of working at the speed that is expected of abled minimum wage workers.
The Walmart I worked at had a mentally disabled girl working in the department next to mine, because they had a program with a local idk what the proper term is, it was a kind of adulthood transition halfway house type thing. And Walmart actually hired on permanent, for regular wages, some of the disabled people, because they were perfectly good workers at particular jobs (cart pusher is a big one, and the community at that Walmart, back in the good times, they loved and protected our cartpushers. Everybody was very upset when somebody did a hit and run on one of them. Thankfully no permanent injuries, but still!) But the girl in the department next to mine, she couldn’t focus well enough to do the work, so they didn’t hire her permanently.
Also, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who was actually expected to support themselves on subminimum wage: they’re always on government assistance and usually have family support of some kind, and their “work” seem to be more of an enrichment program than a job.
You’ve probably seen me blogging about this before, @isaacsapphire, but… wage subsidies.
This all becomes way less of an issue with direct-to-employee hourly wage subsidies, enabling us to have a whole lot of things like high employment, job choice (actual job choice), and livable income for those low on the income scale at the same time.
If it’s cheap enough, someone will be able to find something productive for them to do, and with the subsidies this won’t mean scraping by on the bottom of the barrel.