Topic – Organizer’s Forum August 20: Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities
Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) allows employers to obtain Special Wage Certificates permitting them to legally pay their disabled workers subminimum wages that are less than the federal minimum wage. These entities are almost always sheltered workshops, segregated workplaces that employ workers with various disabilities, including sensory, physical, and cognitive or developmental disabilities. Currently there are approximately 400,000 workers with disabilities being paid subminimum wages, some as low as pennies per hour.
Is this work? Is this training? Is this right?
Mr. Anil Lewis, Director of Advocacy and Policy for the National Federation of the Blind will discuss the legislative advocacy, grassroots organizing, and other social action being taken to secure Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 20, 1-2 pm Eastern time, 12-1 Central time, 11-12 Mountain time, 10-11 am Pacific time
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- Code: 193134#
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Contact Anil Lewis:
- http://www.nfb.org/
- Work: 410-659-9314 ext. 2374
- Twitter: @anillife
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The Organizing Workgroup of the National Disability Leadership Alliance hosts these calls the third Tuesday of every month as a resource for disability organizers, in an effort toward building the organizing capacity of the disability community across the country. They generally follow the format of a Welcome followed by 2-3 experts in a given area speaking for a few minutes on their experiences, advice and challenges. The calls include a 20-30 minute question and answer period.
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Looking forward to talking with you all!
Date: 08/20/2013
Event: NDLA
This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
>> I’m asking people to mute because there’s a lot of background noise.
>> Yeah, can you tell us a command for that, please?
>> I believe it’s star six.
>> Thank you.
>> Will do.
>> Sorry about that.
>> Yeah.
>> Hello? And do we have Mr. Lewis on the phone, our speaker?
>> Cindy and JoAnn.
>> By the way, is Diane on here?
>> No, Diane’s not able to join us today, unfortunately.
>> Oh, I wanted to say hi to her. Okay. I’m going to mute myself. I’m sorry. I was just in the middle of muting when you asked me. This is Joe Hartsung from Michigan. I’m a member both of ADAPT and National Federation of the Blind.
>> Susan Turner.
>> John Perry, NFB.
>> Great.
>> Why don’t we go ahead and sorry, I was going to go ahead and say let’s do quick introductions before we kind of officially get started.
>> Anil: Anil.
>> Oh, good. You’re here Anil. So let’s start with who do we have on the West Coast? Go ahead and share your name and organization.
>> Janene Bertram Kemp, Disability Rights Center in Oregon.
>> Great.
>> And I’m Jessica Layman, the chair organizing the group, and I’m with Diane Coleman, senior and disability in San Francisco. Somebody else on the West Coast?
>> Anthony Lanzoloti.
>> This is Jessica’s coworker Sara Jarman from Senior and Disability Action.
>> I’m Anthony from New Jersey.
>> And do we have
>> in Boulder, Colorado.
>> I was going to say let’s move to the middle of the country. Who was that from Boulder?
>> Not quite sure.
>> I’m (indiscernible) in Boulder.
>> Okay, great. What about the rest of the middle of the country before we go to East Coast.
>> Michael Vancouver from Madison, Wisconsin.
>> JoAnn Johnson and Cindy Gray from Disability Network, Southwest, from Michigan.
>> Michelle and Paula from Kalamazoo, Michigan.
>> Gary Arnold from Chicago, Access Living.
>> Susan Turner from the Access Sights Center in Cleveland, Ohio.
>> Wanda Sloan from the Miami Valley Chapter in Dayton, Ohio.
>> Anthony Lanzolotti from New Jersey, the National Federation of the Blind.
>> Anybody else from the middle of the country? I know I said that it’s a very big middle.
>> Sorry, we were going with east.
>> That’s great. We’ll go ahead and move to the East Coast then.
>> John Durre with National Federation of the Blind.
>> This is Joe Shapiro with NPR.
>> (Indiscernible) with Respect Ability.
>> This is Linda Poke with Disability Lincoln, Atlanta, Georgia. Anybody else that has not introduced themselves?
>> This is Ruby Moore. I don’t know, we were all sort of talking at once so I don’t know who you heard. I’m from Atlanta, Georgia, thank you.
>> I did not hear you. Great.
>> And Carol Dave Harris.
>> And anyone else? Okay. I’m going to go ahead and mute everybody. I’m going to put us in I don’t remember what kind of mode they call it. Question and answer mode I think but anybody can unmute yourself by hitting star six so let me do that now. Hold on one second. So now everybody is muted and you can hit star six to unmute yourself and we’ll just ask people to stay muted most of the time so that we can hear our speaker really well. So I want to welcome everyone to the organizer’s forum.
>> It sounds like someone unmuted themselves already and it’s hard to hear so whoever that is, please mute yourself again. Hit star six to mute yourself. Okay, thanks. So the organizer’s forum is a project of the National Disability Leadership Alliance which is a national coalition across disability organizations. We can let Mr. Lewis talk a little bit more about that if you would like to in a moment. Diane Coleman could not be on the call today but she and I can be and I’m Jessica Layman again, we co chaired the organizing work group and the organizer’s forum. So for people that are new to the organizer’s forum the idea is that we want to support and expand community organizing in the disability community and so these calls we have kind of been playing around with this here, changing the structure a little bit. The typical structure has been we do we always do a call once a month and it’s always the third Tuesday of the month at this time, just a one hour call and we deal with different topics related to community organizing so we’ve done a lot kind of around strategy and tactics like how to get people how to vote or how to set up a town hall meeting. We’ve also been working with different communities and different with different identities and different forms of marginalization so we’ve done some on aging and disability or on race and disability, kind of looking at some of those different intersections. And our latest kind of iteration of the organizer’s forum is every other month we’re going to do an issue based call led by the steering committee of the National Disability Leadership Alliance so we are launching that this month which is very exciting with the National Federation of the Blind. Mr. Anil Lewis is going to talk about fair wages for workers with disabilities, so I will turn it over to him in one second.
A couple other quick things I want to mention. We do a different topic each month and we’re always looking for ideas so please e mail me if you have any ideas and my e mail is on the e mail you should have received about this call today.
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In addition to our monthly calls we realize that one hour a month obviously can’t do justice to the topics we address so we have a ListServe now, we have two ListServes actually. We have a notification on Google that we’re kind of using a little bit less. We have a new ListServe on Yahoo. It’s organizer’s forum at Yahoo groups.com. Anybody can join that. You just go to Yahoo groups.com search for organizer’s forum all one word and join it and that’s the place where we with do some on going discussion after the call if people want to throw out questions or comments. We also have a Facebook page where we can do the same thing so we’re always inviting people to put up there after the call what stood out to you so we can spread that to other people.
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So I believe that’s it. Let me check my list to make sure I covered everything. I sure did. But please be sure to mark your calendar for the third Tuesday of every month. We hope that you will check out some of our other calls.
So with that I want to introduce our speaker, Mr. Anil Lewis who is director of advocacy and policy for the National Federation of the Blind and he’s going to talk about the issue of fair wages for workers with disabilities and he’ll focus on the grassroots and other actions being taken to secure fair wages with emphasis with how everybody on this call can get involved and we’ll want your ideas as well on how to make this issue more successful. So Anil, I’ll go ahead and turn it over to you to talk about the topic.
>> Anil: Thanks, Jessica. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to this nationwide group of advocates. Let me offer a couple of disclaimers. One, when I get ramped up as I talk about this issue sometimes I get emotional. I tend to start talking very quickly so if someone can step up and just let me know if I’m talking too quickly, I would appreciate it.
And the other piece is I will be available for as much followup as you guys would like after the phone call so feel free to contact me. As Jessica was saying, let me first give you an overview of the National Disability Leadership Alliance. The National Disability Leadership Alliance, formerly known as the JFAN, Justice for All Network, is an alliance and that’s exactly where it is, an alliance of 14 national disability run organizations so organizations that participate in the alliance have to be run by people with disabilities. It’s all around the nothing without us about us philosophy. Organizations representing a cross disability organization, set up regular times for us to have conversations. I think in the past the real power of the disability community to move a social and public policy agenda has been thwarted because we tend to operate in silos. That’s still the case. We all have our particular policy in social issues that we kind of take the lead on but by doing it in a group of other similarly situated organizations that have resources to bring to bear, hopefully we can find synergies where we can all leverage our resources together toward one common end. The way we do that is we have an internal policy by which we poll our member organizations to see if there is support of an overwhelming majority of the alliance members toward an issue and if that’s the case then we as an organization well, not an organization, as an alliance adopt a policy statement and we have indeed adopted a position statement with respect to fair wages.
Before I go any further I need to let you guys know Mr. John Perre here at the National Federation of the Blind is also on this call so he’ll be helping me kind of co facilitate the meeting filling any gaps I may leave.
So let’s talk about the issue. As a framework what I’m doing is I’m going to go down the kind of header list of our fair wages page because there’s no way in just this hour I’m really going to try to do it in 30 minutes or less so we will have as much time for questions and answers as possible. There’s no way we could discuss this issue in depth or detail in this time frame so we accumulated a host of information around the fair wages issue that you can read when you have time. The URL, the web address for the fair wages page is www.nfb.org/fair wages and I can send this information out as a followup e mail. We can find some way to post it on the organizer’s page or send it out to the Yahoo list that Jessica named.
But essentially if you go to that site you’ll get the following information. Now, when we talk about fair wages, specifically we’re talking about the issue of Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Now, the Fair Labor Standards Act which the legislation passed in 1938 is the law that guarantees American workers a federal minimum wage. Right now that’s $7.25 per hour. In some states they’ve adopted a higher minimum wage but no one can go below the federal minimum that’s been set by the Fair Labor Standards Act. Unfortunately when they passed the legislation back in 1938 there was a perception that people with disabilities lacked the ability to gain competitive employment meaning people with disabilities could obviously not work and be competitive enough to earn as much as able bodied individuals.
I believe it was wrong then just as wrong as it is today but unfortunately that law has continued to survive throughout the past 70 plus years in place so essentially what the bill allows is it allows an employer to apply for a special wage certificate from the department of labor’s wage and hour division. Essentially this is not an overwhelming process but once they do it they simply state they’re going to employ people with disabilities this disability is a hurdle for them toward gaining competitive employment and they’re going to give them a job based on their now the new term I found is a skills based wage. In the law it’s called a commensurate wage so if you go to the fair wages site you’ll see an introduction that talks about the history of the 14(c) provision, kind of the fundamental basis we believe sustains the provision and a brief list of our objections.
The commensurate wage formula that’s used to pay individuals with disabilities sub minimum wage as some being paid as little as pennies per hour. We’ve seen some getting paid 2 cents and 1 cents per hour. In the J over port they break it down so that approximately 400,000 people with disabilities, many say much more, I’ve heard the figure of 600,000, approximately 400,000 people with disabilities are employed as sub minimum wages, half of them, so 200,000 are making less than half the minimum wage and 25% of them are actually making less than $1 per hour.
Further data states that 95% of the individuals that go into the sub minimum wage work environments, 95% of them spend the rest of their existence less than 5% transition into competitive integrated employment.
Here again it’s kind of remarkable and I guess I’m preaching to the choir that such an unfair discriminatory provision has been allowed to exist for the 70 plus years. We like to in the federation say if we were founded because the federation was founded in 1940 but had we been organized and founded in 1938 this would never have become law but many of you who have advocated in the policy level recognize the emphasis it’s so much easier to stop something from being passed than oppose something in existence. We as an organization have been continuing to fight for the repeal of this since 1940 with little to no real success until recently. The last couple of years the stars seem to be aligning.
So if you go to the fair wages site the next heading after the issue orientation is the FAQ and we compiled a list of frequently asked questions that people ask around this issue, why, is it really true? Why do you think it exists? What are some of the problems? What are some of the potential solutions, et cetera. That’s a pretty lengthy document that’s downloadable so you can click it. It’s a Word document. And here let me take this time to say anything you get from the NFB website that you can use to help us forward our efforts feel free to use it. No worry about trying to site certain things. We want the information to be used in an effective fashion to meet the goal and I’ll elaborate on our goal and strategy later.
The next heading is our fair wage petition. We initially launched our own fair wages position. Especially what the NDLA agreed to do is support the phaseout of the 14(c) certificate. Currently we have a bill in Congress referenced on the page, HR 831 introduced by Gregg Harper. When the bill is passed it translates the use of the special wage certificates.
There’s three categories in our phaseout. One is the private, for profit employers which has a year to phase out and this is significant of the certificates that are held so about 2% maybe of the over 3,000 certificates are held by for profit entities. They have a year to phase out their use of the certificate, governmental and public entities have an additional year so they have a two year phaseout period. Here again they’re a very small percentage. Approximately 6% are held within the governmental private entities. The overwhelming number have a three year period to phase out their use of the certificate and we think that that’s a reasonable amount of time based on some of the information that we received for them to adopt a new business model that move to more of a supportive employment, community integrated training model that’s proven to be less costly and teach real skills.
I neglected to say of course once the bill is passed no new certificates will be offered so this phaseout only deals with those existing certificates. It will have no new ones. At the end of the three year period the 14(c) provision will be repealed and it will be illegal to try to employ individuals with disabilities under those circumstances and certificates. So we had a fair wages certificate I mean a fair wages petition developed. We did this internally because we wanted to start collecting data to see, you know, where we are demographically with people wanting to advocate on this. There’s a little over 3,000 signatures on it now. It’s been representative of the country. It’s been interesting that we’ve seen the different impacts that this 14(c) impact has had on the lives of people across the country.
Also let me add Vermont is the only state in the nation to my understanding that does not have 14(c) certificate holdings in the state. So in addition to our petition, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network worked with change.org and established the petition around a Goodwill protest which I’ll talk about now. And that petition is I think close to if not already over 170,000 signatures on it.
Also on the… I’m sorry, I’ll talk about that in a second. Also beneath that next heading is a list of the special wage certificates. We have a link there that takes you directly there to pull up the most recent data related to the approximately 3,000 special wage certificate holding entities and it comes in an Excel spreadsheet so if you want to play with that our pull the certificates for your particular state, it’s a very easy task to do.
Now, the Goodwill informational protest that we’ve conducted because we’ve kind of targeted goodwill as our symbolic nemesis in our struggle and fight for fair wages and let me give you a little bit of history on why Goodwill was chosen. We didn’t just pull them out of a bag randomly. We identified there are four primarily nationwide entities using the certificates. There’s the United Cerebral Palsy, there is the Archs because they have a self advocacy component who are adamantly opposed but they also have a workshop component which wants to kind of sustain 14(c) so there’s internal conflict there. There’s the Easter Seals organization which really I think they probably work more on housing as opposed to the workshop but they still have a nationwide presence. All three of these, these three are the big four. We reached out early in our advocacy efforts to have a conversation to see if we could get them to start ad least considering adopting the business model. All three of them met with us in a timely fashion, very polite. They were cordial and polite and professional with one another. We reached out to meet with Goodwill, who was the fourth organization of workshops, and they thumbed their nose at us. We wrote several times and made several phone calls. They just wouldn’t meet with us so then we turned to the media. I’m saying this to let you guys know because a lot of people think that the federation just jumps right off into whatever, the best way we can raise a little hell and that’s not the reason. When that’s the only recourse left, we will do it. We want no strife nor confrontation but will do what we have to do and it’s how committed we are to this effort.
So we turned to the media. The story they did is still on the web somewhere with WUSA out of DC but it embarrassed them where we finally got an audience with Jim Givens. No real substance. No real courteousness, professional courtesy or anything in the meeting up. So they opened themselves up to be the target of our symbolic nemesis in this fight for fair wages. They continue to make mistakes that continue to make our point. I jokingly asked our president the other day, I wanted to know if we actually had someone on Goodwill’s payroll to make these mistakes. Well, that’s just me. Notice there’s a little bias in my presentation.
We’ve also had (indiscernible) helped protest when the 511 was introduced, and I’ll talk a little about that later in the call, efforts to authorize the work force act, we tried to get a meeting of the senators and here again we weren’t getting the audience. We weren’t getting the ability to meet with them so we staged a protest in front of the district offices of many of the health committee senate members.
One of our friends on the Hill said the word not making quote unquote friends through that effort and I reminded him that making friends may not be our goal. We have a goal and if we’re allowed an ability to interact on the professional level then we choose that absolutely but when the only recourse we’re left is to put our street on the feet we’re not afraid or opposed to doing it.
The Goodwill protest is going well. As an aside we don’t have this on our website but I attended a meeting in New York with some students with disabilities who had come to talk about this issue and talk about kicking Goodwill off their campus so hopefully I’ll be able to get some of that information together. It’s empowering for me to see some of these young people taking a proactive role and identifying a situation and wanting to be a participant in moving ahead.
The next heading on the web page is a list of supporting organizations. This is key because many people like to think if the federation it’s a splinter in the Federation’s finger but really not. It’s a cross disability coalition of
>> Captioner: I’m asking him to slow down but he’s not hearing me.
>> Anil: It’s interesting to me as we talk about this many of the institutions say there are individuals out there so disabled they can’t work, don’t take any ownership themselves. If a person comes to you and you’re a training entity and you say this person cannot be trained, it’s not the person. Maybe it’s you and your inept training ability so none of them are taking any ownership with respect to the fact they’re saying these people can’t work and be paid more money, maybe it’s you that can’t train them because there are some other strategies out there that help individuals with even the most significant disabilities obtain employment. So like I said there’s over 50 cross disability organizations and we are trying to work on getting more so if anyone on this phone call is on, check the list and if your organization is not on the list please contact me immediately so on I can add your name to the list.
Also on the web page is a host of reference materials, two reports from the National Disability Rights Network there on the page, some of the reports from other individuals who have written on this issue, Dr. Robert [NAME] who has done a lot of research based studies on employment, competitive integrated employment for people with disabilities. That’s at your fingertips. I try to keep this information on the thumb drive because it’s too big to print out and the staff said I handed her the USB, she said I don’t know how to use this. I said go to the web page and pull the data you want. It’s only about ten reports that are on there. If there’s some information that you feel would be helpful that’s not on the list, please contact me and let me know.
There are other articles from the NFB, blog posts from the NFB but also some of the interesting things we’ve seen from a blogger with the Huffington Post and some other individuals that have done things that investigated this issue in a real way, please access that information and if you come across links of information that would be helpful in supporting this effort, please let us know.
Policy statements are basically policy statements of the federation. Just as an aside we are getting other entities to pass resolutions, most notably the Washington State AFO, and we’re in the process now of negotiating a national resolution at their convention in September. There’s a host of press releases about the issue. Here again, if you want to be aware of the things we do towards this effort, you can go to our press release site, subscribe to that and any time we send out a press release you will get the information. There’s a place that’s called In the News, and if you go to the section I encourage you to, I love the piece about the NBC Rock Center piece, did a great job on the Goodwill issue. If you have not seen them, I encourage to you watch it. Then there’s a tail end that has the background and history and I think there’s a document from Cornell University that I don’t think we put it on there but it gives a long list of documentation of the history around 14(c) because I was curious, shocked really to find out when it originally passed, 14(c) had a floor of 75% of the federal minimum wage so you couldn’t pay a person with a disability less than 75% of the federal minimum then they tried to fix it the first time and they reduced the floor to 50% then they tried to fix it again and that’s they reduced the floor to nothing and that’s why we have people being paid 2 cents and cent per hour. We as advocates of people with disability try to continually prove we are engaged in society. There’s another component that continues to push the passionate aspect of a society that continues to drive us backwards. Also on there is my contact information so feel free to People e mail me, fax me, call me and I’ll make myself as available as possible.
Now, I mentioned to you that I would talk to you about Section 511. Let me before I transition on that and I’m going to be very quick on this piece because this piece we have not as an NDLA gotten consensus. I want to be clear to say the NDLA along with other organizations have been adamant about their desire to have 14(c) repealed. Section 511 is a provision that many people are trying to push out and say the disability community is divided on this. There are some organizations of people with disabilities who are more adamant about having it removed that as others. I think I can safely state there aren’t disability organizations that support this section so strongly that they would be upset if it was removed from the work force investment act consideration.
Just to back up a little bit, Section 511 is a component that’s being championed by Senator Harper who is recognized for his efforts in the ADA. It’s his intention to prohibit or prevent use from disabilities to be tracked by hour and employment. Our analysis of this provision says it does the opposite as well as some other detrimental pieces. We had a copy of a report from Sam Beckworth (sp) who we asked to give his opinion on this and expanded it into Olmstead and it’s recently received a rebuttal piece from Curt Decker of NDRN who disagrees with the assessment and I’ll talk about that at the tail end of this under the nuance pieces of this. So I can provide you copies of our position statement and I (indiscernible) I can provide you with a copy of Sam’s report, et cetera but also in the Work Force Investment Act reauthorization, they’re transferring the Rehabilitation Services Administration from under the Department of Education to the Department of Labor.
Here again, there has not been a position adopted by NDLA on this issue but in our opinion what’s happened with this in our meetings on the Hill this is a significant transfer of programs and services that no one can justify through any data or research so one we’re really frustrated with the fact we got this language in such a chart time to review it. Two is no one is telling us the reason other than they want to shake things up or they feel the philosophies will change under DOL and that’s what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of the philosophy changing because it’s (indiscernible) is a necessary one but it’s not conducive to the workplace (indiscernible) to maximize their opportunity for employment so these two items we probably will be working to try to get more of a consensus position from the NDLA but I want you to know those are things we are working on as an organization. I believe again that the transfer is I put down here it’s irresponsible policy development that leads to a associate experiment that could adversely affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals with disability who depend on rehabilitation services so it’s easy to sit back and say rehab is broken but you can’t say you can’t prove to me that moving it is going to fix it and why should I ever engage assuming that the grass is greener on the other side.
All right now let’s talk about this really quickly and then I’ll open it up for calls. We have some organizing goals, right? That’s what this is about, this is an organizer’s forum. I’m encourage you go guys to organize in whichever way you feel comfortable, the NDLA has developed a consensus statement around the repeal of 14(c). I mentioned our bill. I neglected to mention the National Council on Disability also did a respect report on the phaseout of 14(c) that concurred 14(c) should be phased out. Their strategy is over a six year period and more based on how long the person has been in a sub minimum wage environment as opposed to the types of entities using the certificates and they have an expanded report that talks about some other supports that would be essential, helpful in that phaseout process as well. And I think that we link to their report in our research piece. If not I’ll follow up and see.
So our organizing goals are primarily one, the fundamental goal that we’ve gotten a consensus from every disability organization to phrase outer of 14(c). The only ones objecting to phasing out or the workshops on this. It’s important to understand it’s not all the workshops. As a matter of fact there are workshops on our support list that prove through their business model it’s not necessary. So it’s a small and ever shrinking number of the programs out there that have used, historically used the provision that are objecting to this.
An interesting statistic that I read about but I don’t think has been validated is many of the organizations as their leadership changes and they bring new leadership on board they are more willing to change the business model. The individuals who have been doing this for years are the ones most reluctant to adopting a new business model. So our goal one is to repeal 14(c).
Our goal as an organization along with some of our other departments across disability partners collaborate through the determination, which is a group of organizations that report primarily developmental disabilities, they’ve also been very active in helping us try to phase out Section 511 of the Work Force Investment Act. Section 511 in an odd way was kind of a blessing. I was frustrated with respect to the way they developed the policy, I was frustrated with the fact how they fast tracked the legislation, only gave us a weekend to deal with the information. I was frustrated by the internal vote counting so I was frustrated but had to accept the fact they were politically savvy enough to get this far.
Immediately after passage I was upset but after I sat back and reflected I was happy. Now the bill has been held unfavor after the committee it’s allowed us to reveal it to every member of the senate. Formerly they would say it’s a health committee issue and they wouldn’t talk to us about it and now everybody’s going to have to vote on it. We found when the staffers take the time to sit with us and understand this issue we’re able to get more support than I had thought I would be able to so we’re looking forward to the debate on the floor and looking forward to the floor vote.
Here again, most if not all of the disability organizations that we have interacted with although they may not quote unquote oppose 511, they are not opposed to 511 being removed from the bill so I’m simply saying our advocacy efforts through 511 don’t come with any real objections although there are a number of groups fighting to have it repealed no one’s fighting to have it stay in. We also have a goal in there not transferring RSA for the same reasons I said earlier. It’s not founded in any real true policy and here again no one really objects to that RSA staying in the Department of Education. I’ll talk about one of the nuances after the strategy.
Now, our strategy is if you’re a Twitter user, follow NFB at @NFB_voice and personal is and AnilLife, ANILIFE. I don’t know if we have a Twitter feed for NDLA but on this particular issue if you follow those two Twitter feeds you’ll get updated information as we get it. Also friend us on Facebook. I have a Facebook page, our organization has a Facebook page. The other thing I need you to do is we need to start having meetings. We need to you meet with your members to motivate around this issue. We need to meet with other organizations to grow the support list and we’ve got to meet with Congress to compete with their lobbyists. I find the most offensive things I have to deal with every day is to go to a meeting after someone had a good paid lobbyist and I’m saying they’re sitting around paying someone 20 cents an hour and the money they could be using to pay this person fair wages they’re using to pay a lobbyist to allow them to continue to pay this person 20 cents per hour. I think that’s insulting and a moral hypocrisy. We have to educate and these meetings have to educate around the fundamental issue. They just need to understand that it’s legal. We have to educate about the success stories. Many of you on this phone are living the success story. You know a person who otherwise would have been in a shelter or workshop employment. Tell them about the discovery process being used to help people with disabilities. Educate them as well and we need to build our support list and sign the petitions and do some social media stuff. I was impressed after the NBC Rock Center piece, I forget who started it, may have been a nickel group or someone that started the hashtag shame on Goodwill and it was amazing to see how much traffic we got after the Rock Center piece with people saying shame on Goodwill. I won’t even donate you my own dirty blue jeans. The power of social media my favorite tweet said if you want to see how to ineffectively handle a crisis campaign, follow Goodwill. It shut them down. Was a powerful well, wonderful feeling.
We’re going to be conducting days of action that consists of phone calls, e mails and tweeting and Facebook posts. If you want to participate in that like I said follow those two Twitter links. We will be posting stuff to the Yahoo list and if you can engage we would love for you to engage. And of course the federation, we want no confrontation but we’ll do what we have to do and if only allowed to do a protest we will do a protest and if you Joan us with the protest we will be pleased because the last one we had around Goodwill we were joined by people first, some (indiscernible) groups some independent living centers actually participate approximated. If we can do more and more of that it will show there’s a solidarity among people with disabilities who will not stand for anything done about us without us.
I’m sorry I took more time than I thought. One is I really get frustrated with respect to people acquiescing and saying this is the best we can do. They specifically are saying this around 511. I mean I think if we don’t create our own political reality we will be doomed to the other set for us which I think is kind of to most of our missions so I get frustrated when people say this is the best we can do. Things change. Political positions shift. We can influence influencers. We can make a difference if we make up our minds to do so until we make up our minds to do so we fall under the onus of being custodialized to those making the decisions for us. The NDRN response, I just mentioned that to we’re going to reach out and try to understand a little bit more, probably more so we may actually get a formal decision so we can stop the back and forth and get something more definitive so that we’re not confusing people about the different positions and then the last piece I want to segue into the question with this is you noticed specifically with the WEA reauthorization there’s been a lot of calls from the National Council of Independent Living to advocate for the passage of WEA and we support their effort because they’re trying to support the department of the independent living administration and here again there are other good pieces in the bill. For us 511 is really a deal breaker because it sets us so far backwards that it’s unacceptable.
But there is synergy there in the message. It’s just nuanced. Nickel is not few porting the 511. If 511 comes out of the bill, Nickel’s still going to support WEA. If 511 comes out of the bill then make our organization swells some of the other organizations will put more sweat equity in trying to get this particular bill passed because the fight is not over once it passes the senate. It still has to go with the house bill. I don’t think they understand if they throw off the ballast of 511 this particular balloon could fly higher and make more change in the service provision for people with disabilities so that’s a nuance piece so I don’t want people saying disability (indiscernible) that’s one of the advantages and I’ll close with this of the National Disability Leadership Alliance. In the past we nerve would have taken the time to have those conversations and we’ve had them and we understand that none of our particular efforts are at conflict. The only potential conflicts is people are too lazy to really try to understand this issue in a real way and we can’t afford to let that happen so let’s get out there and educate people and let’s put this grassroot advocacy together and let’s make this work. With that I’ll take as many questions as you have for me or as we have time for me to take. I think star six to unmute.
>> Thank you so much Mr. Lewis. That was wonderful. I’m sorry, go ahead.
>> I just have a comment. I actually work at an organization that does have unfortunately work being done by people that are paid sub minimum wage and I I’m having a hard time trying to get other organizations to sign on but one of the things I’m trying to do is to get the organization that has all of the developmental disability organizations or, you know, agencies as a member to try to get those kind of more state oriented organizations to get their member organizations to agree to such an action. And I’m just wondering if that would be something that you all would support because otherwise it’s, you know, one person and one organization trying to change it whereas these state organizations have a lot more power behind them to influence their organizational members.
>> Anil: All right let me stateable we support that. As a matter of fact we’ve been working with many of the national DD groups because intellectual disabilities are the largest group being exploited by this so to my knowledge most of them have adopted a follow os if I they want to transition away from segregated work environments and we’re trying to get them to leverage that goal to make sure these other milestones we could accomplish toward that end are also achieved.
>> I would love if you guys would come out with some kind of statement that then we could use to put the pressure on these state organizations because, you know, I’m in Georgia so there’s only one organization, me, saying it.
>> Anil: We have open letter, we have open letter to employers of people with disabilities I would be more than happy to forward that to you if you e mail me at alewis@ NFB.org and put in the subject line open letter to employers, I will get that out to you.
>> Great, thank you.
>> Anil: Thank you.
>> This is Adrian. I hope this isn’t too far off but this is very similar in some ways it reminds me of the domestic workers Bill of Rights which is going on in Congress at now and on a state level here in California. Do you see this as helpful because it affects another group of people who are not allowed to have wage protection or
>> Anil: We played with the idea of joining those similarities between other groups that are fighting for I mean even the wage disparity for women that’s very current debate. Honestly when it boils down to it people will resonate with their messaging more so than hours because unfortunate no matter how much work we’ve done the overwhelming perception of society is people with disabilities are inferior and they can’t perform in an effective fashion. It’s not a woman could do the same thing as a men. It’s there’s no way a person, competitive. No our message to stay strong we can’t dilute it by trying to draw those particular analogies.
>> Well, that’s very sad but I see the situation. And I understand it. But in line with that like I said we are at least getting some entities who are champions of people that are disenfranchised to affect our issue. They’re trying to address our issue specifically so that we definitely appreciate.
>> Good.
>> Joe Hartsung. Anil.
>> Anil: Joe.
>> Just a comment and you urge my fellow members of ADAPT to look at this (indiscernible) in a Olmstead light we talked about this earlier but I’m opposed to the CRPs and not only for the abuse of the wage certificate which is clearly on its face discriminatory against all people with disabilities but on the segregated environment, and I would like to hear a little bit more about the Oregon suit because I noticed there was somebody in that regard. I’ll shut up and put myself on mute. And thank you, by the way.
>> Anil: Well, definitely my pleasure. I mean, we could talk about the Olmstead deal in Oregon or Rhode Island. We could talk about the (indiscernible) in Iowa and hear again, what happens though is those are the little fires that distract us from the big fire. We are blessed that the DOJ has taken such a proactive role in trying to address this issue but we have to continue to stay focused on the root of the problem and that’s 14(c) so understanding those particular provisions are important especially for those affected in those states but understanding the big issue and how it’s the root of the problem that’s manifested in all of those and those yet discovered forms of abuse and exploitation is what we need to focus on.
>> Anil, this is John. How about tell the group a little bit about one of the things we hear so often is it gives people with disabilities something to do and how you answer that question.
>> Anil: Right. And we want to be responsive to the needs of many families. There are parents you on there who need these particular entities as a place for their adult children with disabilities or even young people with disabilities who are not actively in a school system which is unfortunate to go so they can work and we understand their plight. First thing I say to them is I apologize to them. I apologize that we didn’t find them earlier because then hopefully we would have been able to put them in touch with someone who believes in employment for a philosophy and let them put some services in place that means something to them. The other thing I was engaging with a parent of a child with disabilities the other day and I was talking about understand the component for a safe place for them to be but wouldn’t that safe place look so much better rather than hangers and putting caps on pens that every day they experience a variety of different work tasks until they find the one that finally resonates with this person’s skill set and interests rather than sorting hangers they could be trying any number of different types of work tasks so one day you find this person is good at this and then you develop a training program around this skill set and you help the person get a job at an employable wage at an integrated work environment is on we’re trying to introduce them to a new evolving paradigm of moving away from the segregated, sheltered work environment as the only avenue as really not only the only, as any avenue that a competitive, integrated training model exists for people with all types of disabilities, even those with the most significant disabilities so I respect their plight and I want to move them into a place where they expect more than just a place to park their child.
>> You know, the thing that I’m troubled with, I agree with pretty much everything you said except for the political calculus. By the way, this is Mike Bockhuber from Wisconsin. I know that Senator Harker has vowed that in this, his last year in Congress, he wants to see a rehabilitation act passed that includes Section 511. I know that we have that you have at least one sponsor of a bill in the house but it takes 218 members of the house in order to pass a bill and it takes 60 members of the senate to pass a bill and I’m just worried that you’re setting forth a strategy here that’s going to leave us with no change in the law from years into the future, you know, kind of the half a loaf isn’t good enough strategy.
>> Anil: Let me offer this. One is I don’t think the debacle over 511 is going to be the end all, be all of whether it passes out of the senate or not. I wish that was the case and sometimes I may act like that’s the case but it’s not. WEA will pass with or without 511 so I don’t want people to be afraid our advocacy to remove the section is going to thwart the passage of the bill. The other piece is more philosophical. First of all they said we would not be able to get a bill even introduced into Congress to repeal 14(c) because no one would do it. That’s not true. We’ve done and we’ll continue to do it until it passes. We’ve had so many times we would not be able to pass a law that required safe noise. We did it. That’s the history of creating our own political reality in the face of politicians who have told us it can’t be done so I guess that I respect your concern but my particular existence and experience has been different but I don’t want anyone afraid that our advocacy to remove 511 is going to stop the passage of the bill.
And let me also add lastly there are so many other provisions which are well documented in curt’s rebuttal to the report, so many other issues in the law that dealing with this issue in such a significant way, providing opportunities for individuals to receive services through support of employment, you know, extending all the different support services, et cetera, that there are there is existing language in this bill outside of 511 that will accomplish the goals the senator has laid out for himself. This particular revision in our analysis it’s one thing to say it but actually look at the language yourself before you look at our analysis and you can interpret it but just briefly the section has language that will reduce the number of youthful disabilities from being tracked into subminimum wage environments. If you look at 511 section A.4 it states any person with a disability regardless of age can be referred to a certificate holding entity which is sheltered subminimum workshop under the elements of employment and training. This is under the face of data that shows this environment costs more, produces less outcomes and actually trains a person skills that they have to learn to be competitively employed. People tell us that’s not really true. Even the workshops say it does. We’ve got a quote from one of the Goodwill pieces that says section 511 expands the 14(c) certificate from an employment to an employment training rehabilitation program. That’s their endorsement of this bill so I just want to make sure everyone’s clear on that.
>> John: Anil, this is John to say we think that getting 14(c), you know, the phasing out and the eventually repeal of 14(c) is a difficult task. If it had been easy, you know, there’s been people who have wanted to do this since 1938 and if it would be easy we would have had it done a long time ago so it is a hard task and the people who want to keep things the way they are, some of these workshops are extremely powerful and well funded and they have a lot of money. So this organizer’s forum, this is where we all come in because the key’s going to be that we out organize, that we out advocate that we outspeak and out reason and that we have in our passion and more desire. I always think to my selves for Goodwill this is just a job for a lot of these folks but this is our lives, the lives of our children. This is something we can dedicate the rest of our lives if we can do one thing that would really help change the perception that the entire country or the entire world has of people with disabilities. A lot of people think that people with disabilities really just can’t do much of anything. That’s why we have 14(c) and it’s just I believe wrong and we have to tell people it’s absolutely wrong. We have to show them with our own success and our own passion, this is something that we have to do for ourselves. Nobody can do this for us and we as the organizer’s forum, you know, this is we have to out organize so this is and I know you have been learning, I haven’t been on all the calls but we have been learning about from Jessica and Diane about all of the tools to organize in terms of town halls and other things, organizing techniques. Now this is a really good issue because it’s very cross disability. It’s something that is going to take a lot of time and effort but it’s worth the I believe it’s really worth the reward that we say it’s no longer going to be in law that there’s a two class system, that there’s all people and there’s people with disabilities and that we’re going to change things so
>> Anil: And to highlight that
>> Jessica: This is Jessica. I’m going to have to jump in because unfortunately we’re at the end of our hour. I will turn it back to Anil in just a moment to give our last word but we’re going to lose our captioner and we promised people an hour so I do want to encourage people to go ahead and continue this discussion on Facebook and on the Yahoo ListServe. I certainly want to thank our captioner, and thanks to NDLA for paying for it and a huge things to Mr. Anil Lewis and NFB for leading the call today. Clearly we had a lot of people interested in this topic and I think we all got a lot out of it.
Our next organizer’s forum will be on Tuesday, September 14th at 10:00 to 11:00 Pacific time, 1:00 to 2:00 eastern time and I always get confused about those times so I’ll let you figure it out for yourselves. I think that’s it. I’ll turn it back to Mr. Lewis for our final word.
>> Anil: I want to thank you for participating and listening to this old man talk. I want to close with one piece about what John just said. In the face of us trying to secure the minimum wage, there’s an effort to increase the federal minimum wage for everyone and I think if they can do that I think it’s insulting to think that they can’t at least get to minimum for us as well. So let’s get to work. I apologize if there were people participating via caption and weren’t able to ask their questions but make sure to e mail me and I’ll be sure to answer you. Thank you guys for your time and I appreciate you.
>> Jessica: Thanks everybody. Have a good day.
>> Anil: Thanks, Jessica.
(End of call)
This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.