I’ll just say it with no subtle nuances: the minimum wage harms the handicapped.
Check out THIS discussion on the subject. There’s a really good analysis of the minimum wage in that most people who earn it (even in Alberta) are teenagers looking for spending cash or spouses looking to earn a little income. The majority of people (70%) earning minimum wages don’t need the pay increase nearly as much as the really poor who actually live at the subsistence level.
But I’m interested in how minimum wage laws harm handicapped people and serve to isolate them from society
An excerpt from the discussion was this:
I was now working at a furniture mill. One of the long term employees of the mill was a man, at least 10 years older than me, named Frank. Frank was, as we used to say, a bit slow. He could not do much other than sweep up the place. He could not be trusted with the power machinery — he’d be a danger to himself. But what Frank could do, he did well and he worked hard. Frank was the son of an acquaintance of the owner of the mill. Frank’s job was not, strictly speaking, a charity case. He worked hard for and earned his money. However, it was clear that the owner could have gotten Frank’s work done more cheaply without Frank. I’ve always wondered, how much right does society have to dictate the costs of a business owner’s charity? There are a lot of Franks who work at jobs made just for them at businesses across our country. Every-time we change the minimum wage, it makes it more expensive to keep them on.
A friend of mine was over in the Italian region of Emilia Romogna and observed something: Italy, or at least that region thereof, has no minimum wage legislation.
The lack of minimum wage, he observed, could be the reason he saw so many handicapped people in public, working and living lives like many other people do. Persons with Down Syndrome, for example, seemed to enjoy tasks involving the use of their hands, and at a wage of about $3 per hour, they were employed to put sheathed needles on syringes, which they did quite well. At a higher minimum wage, it would be cheaper for the employer to get a machine to do it.
Back here in Canada, employing handicapped persons below the minimum wage would be called exploitation. Another firend of mine has a mentally challenged relative who lives in a day home, where his productive hours are spent sorting screws, but it’s just some task given to him by the handlers in the home to keep his day occupied. Every day, after he finishes sorting the screws, they get taken to a back room and sent back to “the factory”. I wonder if he knows they just re-mix the screws for him for the next day, or if it would hurt his feelings if he found out.
But the guy actually has an employable skill, but it’s not employable at the minimum wage. It’s too bad his efforts are gone to waste while he’s sequestered in a day home. The fact that his efforts are wasted is not the point. I just think that minimum wages can marginalize mentally handicapped people from the rest of society because they are all grouped together in these homes and are rarely integrated into every day life. It might feel good for the guy to get out of the day home for 2 hours each day to sort screws at Home Depot and make some money for doing it. It might even make him feel the opposite of “handicapped”.
In Alberta, minimum wage laws apply to the severely disabled, as outlined in the regulations. Physically handicapped people can still attend school and pick up very marketable skills, but the mentally challenged cannot. The physically handicapped person can offer knowledge work with limited physical labor. The mentally handicapped person is lucky to offer limited labour.
So minimum wage laws price the mentally handicapped out of the labour market. At the minimum wage, it’s not rational for a business to employ their specific skill set. We would rather make the minimum wage apply to the mentally challenged so the business’ act of employment becomes an act of charity. Paying someone more than the value of their marginal product of labour isn’t a sustainable business practice. The next time the minimum wage is hiked, guess who’s on the chopping block? It’s the guy who’s being paid more than he is able to contribute.
Where businesses aren’t so charitable, we set up programs to centralize the mentally challenged in one place, out of society’s way. We then re-integrate them into every day life by the busload on periodical field trips, where the average person, not used to interacting with the mentally challenged, is shocked by the parade of people. To reconcile the cognitive dissonance, the average person dismisses the abnormal sighting by labelling them “retards”.
But maybe the case of Emilia Romogna is the ‘normal’ state of affairs. Maybe it’s normal to run into mentally challenged people in the workplace. Removing mentally challenged people from every day life creates the illusion that “life without retards” is normal, and when we do run into them, it becomes this hugely abnormal episode.
Recently, Alberta allowed people as young as 12 to participate in the workforce. Granted, there are some reasonable rules and conditions such as no more than two hours of work on a schoolday, no more than 8 hours on a non-school day, and always between the hours of 9 am and 6 pm. But if you’re a little kid, it’s tough to say no to a big boss, so it requires close monitoring by the parents. It might be interesting to see what would happen if we allowed employers to offer below-minimum wages (through a government subsidy) to the mentally handicapped, given a set of such criteria.
