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The Justice Department reached a settlement last week regarding approximately 200 students with intellectual and developmental disabilities who were placed in jobs that paid them little to no money, violating both the ADA and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Per the settlement, the State of Rhode Island and the city of Providence agreed to help transition students to better jobs with better pay.
The state-funded Training Thru Placement program put students in “sheltered workshops” that paid between 50 cents and two dollars an hour, or nothing at all. Once students graduated from the program, they still had little or no skills that could help them to transition to employment.
“Even 23 years after the ADA though, the State of Rhode Island and the City of Providence have allowed their low expectations to create a system that left people with disabilities no choice but to be separated from society,” a DOJ press release said.
Students in the program, ages 14 to 21, were reportedly paid an average hourly wage of $1.57, with one student earning 14 cents an hour. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers are allowed to pay people with disabilities less than minimum wage with proper certification by the Department of Labor.
Even though the program had certification, the DOL revoked it last week, citing falsified documents and spotty recordkeeping.
“The agency found that TTP failed to determine the appropriate sub-minimum wage to be paid to each worker as allowed under Section 14(c) of the FLSA, properly record and pay employees for all hours worked, and determine the prevailing wage rates for workers performing similar work in the area,” a DOL statement said. “The company also falsified documents in order to mislead investigators.”
Services performed by students included packaging and labeling medical supplies, wrapping television remote controls in plastic and hand-sorting jewelry.
“The unnecessary segregation of people with I/DD [intellectual and or developmental disabilities] in sheltered workshops and segregated day programs contravenes one of the primary purposes of the ADA: to end the isolation and segregation of individuals with disabilities,” a DOJ statement said.
Chief among the criticisms of the program was the dependency and narrow scope of skills it fostered, the opposite of the purpose of vocational programs.
“In the past twenty-six years, only a handful of individuals have transitioned into individual supported employment after leaving Birch,” according to the DOJ.
The DOJ asserted that the Olmstead Supreme Court decision, which prohibited unnecessary residential segregation of people with disabilities via institutions, also covers employment segregation.
“The Supreme Court decision making this requirement clear, Olmstead v. LC, has been called the Brown v. Board of Education of the disability rights movement. And nowhere is that more true than here. TTP and Birch demonstrate in every way that separate is not equal.”
The DOJ used the case of Steve Porcelli as an example of the failings of TTP.
Porcelli “worked in a real job after high school at a hardware store [and] could not – for the next 30 years – escape a sheltered workshop setting where he earned less than $2.00 an hour doing work he disliked. Because the State only offered services for people with I/DD in segregated places like TTP, he could not return to integrated employment, even though he asked to leave over and over. Steven was trapped at Training Thru Placement for no reason other than the State’s choices.”
The principal of the vocational program that used TTP to place students resigned last week, according to the Providence Journal. It remains to be seen whether a criminal investigation or class action lawsuits on behalf of the students ensue.
Photo on homepage courtesy of TexasGOPVote.com, Flickr
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