Goodwill pays disabled workers below minimium wage - and its legal

[Jim Lane]

12. I agree with you. My father used to be involved with a sheltered workshop.

There were for-profit manufacturers that had work to be done that could be done at the center where my father worked. For example, the manufacturer would provide a lot of model airplane parts -- a box of fuselages, a box of wings, etc. -- to be sorted out into individual model airplane kits for sale.

The people my father worked with could do this work. They just couldn't do it as efficiently as most people. If the center had been required to pay them minimum wage, then the prices it would have had to charge the outside companies would have been noncompetitive. Those companies, who weren't looking to help the disabled but just wanted their model airplane kits assembled, would have placed the contracts elsewhere. The exemption from the minimum-wage law was the only way the project could go forward.