No link turn – subminimum wages and occupational segregation mean the jobs the aff creates are still hostile to disabled people

(David – professor of sociology @ University of Toronto, Michelle Maroto - professor of sociology @ University of Alberta, and Jennifer Brooks – research associate in the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability @ Cornell, “The Sociology of Disability-Based Economic Inequality,” Contemporary Sociology 54.1, 2022)

Subminimum Wages and Sheltered Workshops One of the most severe forms of labor market marginalization, exclusion, and inequality among people with disabilities comes from sheltered workshops and assignment of subminimum wages. Not only is the practice detrimental to already vulnerable workers, but it directly challenges decades-long efforts by the disability-rights movement and rights policies to dismantle labor market inequality. Although important opportunities exist to bring the discussion of subpar wages among disabled workers into the growing social science research on minimum wage, few scholars in the area have done so. Growing discussions about raising the minimum wage, promoting living wages, and supporting the working poor have expanded the focus of social scientists interested in the impacts of subminimum wages on a host of socioeconomic outcomes. But disabled people remain largely absent from sociological investigations of subminimum wages and low-wage work more generally, even though there is a long history of legally sanctioned subminimum wages for this group. Subminimum wages and sheltered workshops grew out of the American welfare state as an effort to get disabled people into jobs, no matter what those jobs were. Instead of addressing structural and attitudinal barriers in the mainstream labor market, legislators focused on creating a separate system that would provide workers with disabilities menial jobs and limited earnings. Even with a singular focus on increasing employment rates among people with disabilities, vocational rehabilitation policies further relied on sheltered workshops paying subminimum wages. As rights entered the political fray, activists, welfare professionals, and policy-makers began to question the unequal and contradictory outcomes produced by this system (Power and Marinelli 1974; Whittaker 2005). Today, about 200,000 Americans receive Department of Labor (DOL) waivers permitting subminimum wages, often clustered in certain regions and sectors of the labor market (Friedman 2019). But these waivers account for only one segment of subminimum wage workers. In addition to policy-sponsored programs that allow subminimum wages to some groups, practices like so-called ‘‘wage theft’’ amount to paying workers below the minimum wage (Haley-Lock 2012; Azar 2003; Lambert 2008; Bernhardt, Spiller, and Polson 2013; Clemens and Strain 2020). These practices are common in the low-wage sector where many disabled workers are clustered. The assignment of subminimum wages, especially to already vulnerable and marginalized groups like people with disabilities, signals to employers and others more broadly that disabled people’s labor is worth less than that of those without disabilities. The segregation of disabled workers in competitive employment into low-wage and precarious jobs highlights structural and attitudinal dimensions of work that allude to a much more complicated (and sociologically interesting) relationship between disability and the labor market. Occupational Segregation Policies like the ADA interact with supplyand- demand factors to shape employment outcomes. The ADA did not outline how exactly it would contend with things like the lack of job skills and training, human capital, or a desire for flexible jobs on the one hand or employer preferences and demands and occupational norms on the other. Earlier work ignored how the ADA addresses these other institutional and organizational layers shaping labor market outcomes. Over the last decade, a growing body of work at the intersection of sociology and economics has emphasized how these factors shape persistent marginalization and inequality among disabled workers. One key understudied area is occupational segregation—the clustering of people with disabilities into precarious, low-paying, non-union jobs. Based on an analysis of 30,000 employers, Schur and colleagues (2009) found that workers with disabilities were more likely to work in low-wage, low-skilled jobs, have lower earnings, experience lower levels of job satisfaction, and have less job security. They were also less likely to be involved in job and department decisions, were less likely to be promoted, were more closely supervised, and had lower levels of training than workers without disabilities. More recent work by Schur and Kruse (2022) confirms these findings. People with disabilities are unequally distributed across industries and occupations, but surprisingly little is known about how this occupational segregation is related to supply-and-demand explanations about disability labor market outcomes or how it is shaped by the interaction between occupational characteristics and the nature of disability (Domzal, Houtenville, and Sharma 2008). Several studies have focused exclusively on public sector (namely government) workers (Lewis and Allee 1992; Robert and Harlan 2006) but have not systematically explored how disability type is distributed across occupational sectors more generally. Yet labor market scholars have generally suspected that people with disabilities are more likely to be in government jobs, manufacturing and service jobs, and manual labor (Hale, Hayghe, and McNeil 1998; Jones 2008; Smith and Twomey 2002).Workerswith disabilities, especially cognitive disabilities, aremore likely to be in entry-level jobs requiring low levels of experience (Kaye 2009). Using a 2011 ACS sample of 1,071,314 working-age adults, Maroto and Pettinicchio (2014a) systematically analyzed the distribution of people with different disabilities across 24 major occupations and 15 major industry sectors. They calculated measures of dissimilarity and isolation (Massey and Denton 1988). The former captures the concentration of disabled workers in occupations and the latter measures the chances that a person with a disability shares a job or sector with another person with a disability. They found that while segregation based on race and gender is more prominent than for disability, occupational segregation varied significantly by type of disability. Generally, people with disabilities are underrepresented in management, business, and science occupations, among the highestearning sectors, and overrepresented in clerical, service, and food preparation occupations, among the lowest-paying jobs (subsequent studies have found similar clustering; see Houtenville and Kalargyrou 2015 and Kumin and Schoenbrodt 2016). For example, one of the most common occupations for people with cognitive disabilities was food preparation, where the average annual earnings were only $18,168. People with disabilities were more likely to experience ‘‘tokenism’’—being the only person with a disability in their workplace. Tokenism is especially common for individuals with selfcare, ambulatory, and cognitive disabilities. An important opportunity exists to bring sociological work on status characteristics, queueing, and statistical discrimination theories to explain occupational segregation as both a result of and contributor to discriminatory practices and their underpinnings in negative beliefs about disability and work. When workers with disabilities remain confined to certain areas of the labor market, it reinforces the notion that these are the only jobs they can do. Conversely, as Wilgosh and Skaret (1987) explained years ago, prior experience in hiring people with disabilities goes a long way in dispelling myths and fostering more positive attitudes and greater likelihood of further hiring people with disabilities. Wider research implications from disability-based occupational segregation speak directly to the relationships between employer demands, expectations, beliefs, and norms about work and workers. They add to the sociological focus on the growing polarization between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ jobs (Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson 2000) and how marginalized communities are especially affected as they tend to be in low-paying, non-unionized, precarious employment.