The only catch is, the pay isn’t so good. These workers – and some 280 other Goodwill employees within the territory stretching from Sheboygan to Chicago – make an average of $4.30 an hour. A section of the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed during the Great Depression, permits employers to pay disabled workers based on their productivity, even if that means less than minimum wage.
Not all Goodwill organizations in the country make use of this loophole. Pat Boelter – chief marketing officer for the Southeastern Wisconsin organization, the largest of its kind within the Goodwill network – explains its use here by pointing to the program’s financial losses. “It’s more than a work program,” she says. Workers receive medical care, case managers, help from teachers. But is that enough to justify sub-minimum wage? No, says Ari Ne’eman, president and co-founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a Washington, D.C., group run by adults with autism. “The problem is that people are profiting off the labor of Goodwill’s disabled employees,” he says of ASAN’s petition calling for better pay for disabled employees. “We were unhappy about how Goodwill’s actual business practices did not match their reputation.”
Other groups have rattled swords, including the chapter of the National Federation of the Blind local to Dane County, where the incumbent Goodwill organization pays all of its workers at least minimum wage. “If they can do it, why can’t all of them?” says the chapter’s president, Justin Salisbury.
Disability Rights Wisconsin wants to heighten oversight of programs that use the loophole while collecting federal funding. “Why is my tax dollar going to provide Goodwill and other programs of its type free labor?” asks Monica Murphy, DRW’s managing attorney.
