US Seeks to End Subminimum Wage for Workers With Disabilities

President Joe Biden’s Department of Labor is proposing to abolish below-minimum-wage pay for people with disabilities, targeting a long-controversial program whose fate will now rest with the incoming Trump administration.

Since the New Deal, federal law has authorized the department to permit paying particular employees a lower “special minimum wage” on the grounds that their disabilities impair their productivity. That law, passed half a century before the Americans With Disabilities Act, was meant to shield people with disabilities from being deemed too expensive to employ. But it’s been denounced by advocates as a form of legalized discrimination that rips off and marginalizes those it purports to protect.