Doug Crandell, "Twenty-Two Cents an Hour: Disability Rights and the Fight to End Subminimum Wages" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Mar 21, 2026

Investigates the history and persistence of subminimum wages for people with disabilities. Reveals how language, institutions, and lobbying sustain segregated workplaces. Examines high-profile abuses and legal battles that challenged the system. Highlights alternatives like inclusive education, apprenticeships, and customized employment.

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ANECDOTE

Goodwill Paid Workers 22 Cents an Hour

Goodwill's lowest-paid workers earned as little as 22 cents an hour under subminimum wage certificates.
Doug Crandell obtained that figure via a Freedom of Information request and contrasts it with Goodwill executives earning hundreds of thousands of dollars.

ANECDOTE

Christmas in Purgatory Exposed Institutions

Burton Blatt and photographer Fred Kaplan covertly entered institutions and published Christmas in Purgatory to reveal horrific institutional conditions.
Their photos and distribution to every member of Congress helped trigger deinstitutionalization and community-based funding reforms.

INSIGHT

Language Masks Segregated Work As Benevolence

Language and branding cloak segregated work as benevolent community programs, hiding employer roles and profit motives.
Sheltered workshops call themselves industries or rehabilitation programs while billing state and Medicaid dollars and paying subminimum wages for decades.

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In Twenty-Two Cents an Hour: Disability Rights and the Fight to End Subminimum Wages (Cornell UP, 2022), Doug Crandell uncovers the harsh reality of people with disabilities in the United States who are forced to work in unethical conditions for subminimum wages with little or no opportunity to advocate for themselves, while wealthy CEOs grow even wealthier as a direct result. As recently as 2016, the United States Congress enacted bipartisan legislation which continued to allow workers with disabilities to legally be paid far lower than the federal minimum wage. Drawing on ongoing federal Department of Justice lawsuits, the horrifying story of Henry's Turkey Farm in Iowa, and more, Crandell shows the history of the policies that have led to these unjust outcomes, examines who benefits from this legislation, and asks important questions about the rise of a disability industrial complex. Exposing this complex—which is rooted in profit, lobbying, and playing on the emotions of workers' parents and families, as well as the public—Crandell challenges readers to reexamine how we treat some of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. Twenty-Two Cents an Hour forces the reader to face the reality of this exploitation, and builds the framework needed for reform.

Doug Crandell is Public Service Faculty at the Institute on Human Development and Disability at the University of Georgia. For more than thirty years he has worked in disability advocacy, specifically the intersection of employment, economic justice, and much-needed systems change. Doug Crandell is the author of several book and novels, inlcuding most recently "They're Calling You Home."

My co-producer for this episode is Shea Tripp, a graduate student in the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University.

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