Larry Simpson used to work in the sewing room of a disability enterprise. From 9am to 2pm, three days a week, he would count and sort bags of laundry from local hotels and hospitals. The work made him “very tired and drained”, the 36-year-old says.
Under the current national minimum wage of $23.23 an hour, Simpson could expect to earn $348.45 for his three days of labour. But he was paid $4.20 an hour – a total of $63 a week – a rate that’s only legal for one reason: because he has an intellectual disability.
“The pay was crap,” says Simpson. “I wasn’t getting enough money to live on.”
Simpson was employed under the supported wage system – a carve-out in national employment law that allows companies to assess the productivity of a person with disability and then pay them as little as $2.90 an hour.
About 20,000 people, mostly workers with intellectual disability, are employed under Australia’s supported wage system. Some of them are working in the open market, but most – about 17,000 people – are employed in what were once called “sheltered workshops”, now Australian disability enterprises (ADEs): segregated work environments specifically structured for people with intellectual disability.
Some carers and people with disability say ADEs are a place of respite and community – but ADEs are looking down the barrel of change. While the campaign against subminimum wages for people with intellectual disability is not new, it has had a fresh fire stoked under it by the royal commission into violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of people with disability. Last year, the commission recommended that the federal government aim to reduce workplace segregation and achieve wage parity for people with disability by 2034, beginning with a scheme to immediately raise wages to at least 50% of the current minimum.
The United Nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities stipulates that people with disability are entitled to “just and favourable conditions of work, including equal opportunities and equal remuneration for work of equal value”, echoing principles determined decades earlier on the issue of pay equity for women.
In Australia, however, that principle has been subject to a perverse interpretation: that subminimum wages are considered justified on the basis that “work of equal value” may take a person with disability longer to perform.
‘Everyone deserves equal pay’
For Sonia Hume, 50, pay equity cannot be separated from human rights. She used to work in an ADE – two three-hour days a week in a school canteen, making toasties and serving meals to students and teachers. She was paid $2.50 an hour – a wage that didn’t even cover her bus trips to work.
“The job made me feel good in one way, in that I actually had a job considering that I didn’t have any experience or anything in any other job,” Hume says. “But in another way it made me feel that I didn’t want to be there because of the pay rate.”
She felt belittled by her colleagues, was told she was too slow. “It made me feel useless. It made me get really bad self-esteem and I thought that I could never be good enough for people,” Hume says.
Since leaving the ADE, Hume and Simpson have become advocates for other people with intellectual disability, and work as consultants for Speak Out, an advocacy organisation in northern Tasmania, where they are paid full wages.
“I think the law needs to be changed so we can get the same amount as everybody else in the world. To make us equal – equal to everybody,” says Simpson.
“No matter if you’ve got a disability or not, everyone deserves equal pay,” says Hume. “And it’s against my human rights not to get paid a real wage.”
The advocacy organisation Inclusion Australia also believes it’s time for a radical overhaul.
“In 10 years’ time, I would like it to be absolutely taken for granted that people with an intellectual disability work in a range of settings, so that people in their normal working life come across people with intellectual disability all over the place,” the organisation’s chief executive, Catherine McAlpine, says.
“That’s the future that we want to see. And we think the best way to get there is to do a significant transition of the ADE sector.
“We’re not calling for them to be closed down. But we are saying that the status quo is not acceptable. There must be significant change.”
Wage parity is a key element of that change, McAlpine says – and there are many interlinked parts that need to shift for that to happen.
People in the supported wage system also receive the disability support pension, which tapers off very steeply once their wages cut in. At $1,002.50 a fortnight for a single person, the DSP is higher than jobseeker, but still well below the poverty line (approximately $1,204 in 2023).
ADEs also require workers to be participants in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which funds employment supports for workers that are paid to employers. For larger ADEs, this income from the NDIS can run well into the millions, with evidence heard by the disability royal commission suggesting much of this goes into capital costs.
For those people who have family support, wage parity might not seem as important, but for those who subsist solely on the DSP, the extra pay would make an enormous difference.
“At the moment, the status quo is not working for everyone with an intellectual disability. Therefore, the policy settings have got to change,” McAlpine says.
Inclusion Australia also wants to see the development of straightforward, accessible pathways into open employment for people with intellectual disability, rather than what they call the “polished pathway” into ADEs – where the route to an ADE is the easiest one to follow.
‘Wage parity has to be our destination’
Aruma is one disability service provider currently working through what a transition to wage equity would mean for its ADE operations.
“The application of a human rights lens to wages paid to people with disability says that wage parity has to be our destination,” says Martin Laverty, the chief executive at Aruma and previously an inaugural director of the NDIS.
“ADEs won’t deliver it because ADEs across the nation are not financially able today to meet that human rights expectation. It’s why we need to overhaul the objective of ADEs if wage parity is our destination … [but] it has to be approached with a sensitive and transitional plan in place.”
Aruma operates a farm, a commercial laundry and a biscuit factory as ADEs and provides a number of other disability services, including NDIS support coordination, specialist disability accommodation, and community participation centres.
Laverty agrees that ADEs need to be changed and reoriented, and many will need to be restructured to make them financially sustainable with the increased costs of wage parity. But he argues that there is still a need in the community, especially for people who now work in them, for ADEs to continue in some form.
For the younger generation, though, we should create ample opportunities in the public and private sectors for people with intellectual disability, Laverty says.
“The barriers that exist to that in some cases are still discrimination, prejudice. Our legal framework is OK; it’s perhaps just not enforced, or indeed, positively encouraged in the way that it needs to be.”
The challenge of the open market
Tory Newby, 22, has experienced the difference between ADEs and open employment. She has worked in a hospitality role at Summerland Farm – Aruma’s macadamia and avocado farm and function centre in the Ballina-Byron hinterland of New South Wales – since she was a teenager.
Newby says she feels “comfortable there, like you would be at home”. She is equally effusive in praise of her colleagues: “They’re very friendly. Once you get to know them, they are really comfortable and nice and just warming. And they always have an open heart.”
After working at Summerland, Newby tried moving into open employment. “I had been bouncing back and forth to different places to try something that would have benefited my disability. But none of them worked,” she says.
Newby tried a nursing home, but her training was brief and didn’t sufficiently accommodate her disability, resulting in severe stress and anxiety. Her experience speaks to a broader problem, which McAlpine and Laverty note, of the failure of the public and private sectors to tailor employment and training strategies for people with intellectual disability.
“On my second day there, I was left on my own. And I was just a little bit confused, and then I had to keep myself away from people because I just started panicking and crying in front of the residents. And I did feel guilty about that,” Newby says.
The stress was too much, so she returned to Summerland. She is employed there under the supported wage system and works four eight-hour days a week, plus events.
Newby doesn’t know how much money she earns an hour – like many people with intellectual disability, her family helps her manage finances. Until asked about it by Guardian Australia, Newby wasn’t aware that the law allows people with disability to be paid less than minimum wage. Once aware, however, her opinion became clear.
“I truthfully think that’s a little bit unfair. I feel like everyone deserves the same amount of pay. That should be even. It feels really bad that for people with disabilities, you just have a small amount of pay. It’s like they’re saying that [people with disability] don’t deserve to have that amount of money,” she says.
“It makes me feel kind of confused. Like, why would you do that? Why can’t we make better money? I just feel confused and upset. We work for that money. We earn it. We deserve it.”
