Economic Justice

Though it was not on the call agenda, one of my colleagues from the Collaboration to Promote Self-Determination (CPSD), Ari Ne’eman, president of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), asked whether federal contractors paid less than the federal minimum wage would be included in this executive order. Ari was referring to the fact that thousands of federal contractors are paid subminimum wages because they have disabilities, due to an arcane provision that exempts businesses holding special wage certificates from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. This allows these businesses to pay workers with disabilities subminimum wages, sometimes as low as mere cents an hour.

Perez replied that the White House did not have the authority to prevent subminimum wages for workers employed by employers with 14(c) certificates. We challenged this suggestion during the call, and immediately began to craft an advocacy campaign to educate the administration about the archaic law it was defending and urge it to include workers with disabilities in the executive order. As the former Department of Justice civil rights division chief who enforced the 1999 Supreme Court decision Olmstead v. L.C., which mandated that Americans with disabilities must receive services in the “most integrated setting,” we knew we had a champion in Perez.

Our approach was twofold: first, to build a broad coalition of disability, social justice, civil rights and labor advocacy organizations. This served two purposes: to get the administration’s attention and to prevent the infighting that too often plagues individual constituencies, including disability groups. By preventing these internal quarrels over technical issues, we were able to focus on confronting the main issue of unequal rights for people with disabilities. Our first step to achieve this was to produce an organizational sign-on letter that was distributed across a wide network of potential supporters.

Our second tactic was to craft a simple message – one of fairness and decency – that appealed to all audiences: that the president’s executive order was wrong to exclude disabled workers simply because they are disabled. As Obama himself stated during the State of the Union, “If you cook our troops’ meals or wash their dishes, you shouldn’t have to live in poverty.” Though he may not have realized it, many of the workers who perform these jobs are employed through a network of providers that receive federal contracts for goods and services, and are able to profit by paying workers with disabilities less than the minimum wage.