Minimum wage for everybody -- yes, even the disabled

Arizona voters passed a new minimum wage that goes into effect this week and for the first time it will not exempt disabled workers from economic parity. As you might imagine, this disturbs many people who run business using sheltered workshops where pay is adjusted according to perceived differences in worker productivity.

According to the New Standard News:

Some 5,600 employers pay sub-minimum wages to about 424,000 workers across the country, according to a 2001 report from the US Government Accountability Office. More than half make less than $2.50 an hour.

Marta Russell, disability rights activist and author of Beyond Ramps (an excellent analysis of the economic ghetto created for disabled persons in a capitalist society), comments:

"‘Commensurate wage’ is an Orwellian tag for a law that legalizes inequality," said disability-rights activist and author Marta Russell. "It degrades the disabled laborer to equate his [or] her productive capacity as less than [that of] a non-disabled laborer and to not give them equal pay. Who is to say that the disabled worker’s labor is not equal to or more productive or profitable for their employers than the average couch potato’s?"

And:

"All laborers should be paid at least a minimum wage, and preferably a living wage," Russell, who uses a wheelchair, told TNS. "That is the only way to raise the disabled workers in question here to an equal economic level with non-disabled workers and lift some of them up out of a below-poverty-level existence. To be paid anything less is to further enslave the disabled worker more than workers in general are already enslaved."