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subminimum wage
The Disabled Community’s Election-Season Message to America: Don’t Box Us Out
We deserve to not just survive, but to thrive. And we’ll fight like hell, and vote like hell, until we get everything we deserve.
Oct 26, 2024
It’s been a hell of a year for everyone. Record-breaking natural disasters have decimated entire cities, gun violence continues to plague our schools and public spaces with little-to-nothing done to stop it. Grocery and rent prices are high, wages are low, the U.S. war machine rages across the globe while we have no choice but to foot the bill, and yet another major election looms.
For disabled folks across the country, these issues and more have never been more amplified. The reality for our community is that disabled people are exhausted because we’re being left behind with no choice but to fight for our survival in a world that isn’t designed for it. We’re being forced to grieve because our friends and family are dying—deaths that are often avoidable. We’re still being misrepresented in the media, still without adequate access both in physical spaces and in the digital realm, and all the while our needs aren’t being heard. 2024 has proven, once again, that we as a community are being cast aside. But what those in power don’t realize is that while they ignore us, we’re organizing. We are making it known that we’re tired of being forgotten, and we’re ready to fight.
Right now in the final days of the election, we’re seeing politicians going about business as usual—touting plans for the country, states, and local communities that sound appealing but often lack substance and detail. That in itself is frustrating and disheartening, but disabled folks aren’t even seeing themselves in the conversation. We aren’t at the table in any way. Candidates aren’t including disabled people in decision-making processes when it comes to policy and campaign platforms. Disability orgs nationwide have approached campaigns to ask candidates about the issues facing our community, and are being met with lackluster responses; in many cases, no response at all. We are being neglected by those in power, even as we continue to raise our voices about what we need.
The disability community is not a monolith, but we are a legitimate voting bloc and one that demands to be taken seriously.
The recent devastating hurricanes across the South have shown us not just the horrific consequences of our inaction on climate change, but also that disabled folks are being boxed out of disaster preparedness measures and training. How can disabled people survive these storms if there’s no plan in place for how to save us? Saving ourselves only goes so far when there’s no consideration for our well-being in the plans that local and state governments make. Emergency resources are often inaccessible, leaving many out of reach of help that they desperately need. Disabled folks are two to four times more likely to die or be critically injured during a disaster—that in itself is a crisis, and one that we are being left alone to navigate.
Disabled people are also being forced into poverty at frightening rates. As the cost of living continues to increase across the board, the cost of survival for disabled folks is at an all-time high. People have to choose between full-time employment or government assistance for services they need to live; there is no middle ground here. Thousands of disabled people across the country are being paid subminimum wages, with hundreds of businesses allowed to do so thanks to the legality of 14c certificates. Over 700,000 people across the country are on waiting lists for in-home care Medicaid waivers that in many cases have left them with no choice but to live in nursing homes. All the while, states like Texas, which has over 300,000 people on its waiting list, boast budget surpluses in the tens of billions. Funding of these waivers are given the lowest priority, even while advocates beg lawmakers to do something. Anything.
For multiply marginalized disabled folks, like Black disabled people and trans disabled people, their lives are at greater risk due to law enforcement interactions and dangerous legislation than ever before. Fifty percent of those killed by law enforcement are disabled, and 55% of Black disabled men are likely to be arrested by 28 years old. The killing of Sonya Massey in July shows plainly, as do countless other examples, that Black disabled folks are not safe when interacting with police.
Legislation that targets the LGBTQ+ community has a significant impact on disabled folks as well, with the anti-trans legislation being introduced and enacted in states across the country leaving trans disabled folks at risk of not receiving care that they need. And we know that transgender people are more likely to be disabled than cisgender people.
And let’s not forget about one of the biggest threats to disabled autonomy that there is—voter suppression. Across the country, hundreds of anti-voter laws have been introduced and in many cases passed, which disproportionately affect disabled voters and prevent them from participating in Democracy. In Alabama, SB1 prohibited voters from receiving assistance with absentee ballots, which specifically targeted disabled Alabamians who rely on assistance from care workers to cast their vote in elections. SB1 is just one example of the over 400 anti-voter bills that have been introduced in recent years.
Where does this leave us today? Exhausted. But that doesn’t mean we’ve given up. The disability community is not a monolith, but we are a legitimate voting bloc and one that demands to be taken seriously. We are a powerful community of people with a shared identity that has empowered us like never before. The disability justice movement, which centers self-determination and emphasizes that ableism is a form of oppression that is linked to other forms experienced by the most marginalized among us, has grown exponentially in recent years. Activists across the country are fighting on behalf of all of us to be seen and heard. We’re working to shift the lens on disability—to be seen as more than just one thing. We’re running for office and assuming positions of leadership. We’re launching our own organizations, advocacy groups, media companies, and news publications because that’s what we need to do to make sure we’re being counted.
And so, in the last weeks of the election, if there’s one message the disability community has, it’s this: Don’t box us out. Don’t ignore us. Because we might be tired, but we’re here. We’re fed up. And we deserve the autonomy we’ve been fighting for day in and day out. We deserve to not just survive, but to thrive. And we’ll fight like hell, and vote like hell, until we get everything we deserve. 2024 be damned.
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A Pro-Worker Tip for Harris: Don't Copy Trump's Faux No-Tax-On-Tips Sham
Despite its embrace by the candidates from both major parties, this policy idea would do little to help the roughly 4 million people who work in tipped occupations while creating a host of problems.
Aug 20, 2024
While the next President faces a wide range of pressing tax policy choices to make — from the expiration of much of 2017’s Trump tax law to international corporate taxation and beyond — a relatively silly idea has become the tax focus on the campaign trail: exempting tips from taxes. Despite its embrace by the candidates from both major parties, this policy idea would do little to help the roughly 4 million people who work in tipped occupations while creating a host of problems.
Exempting tips from taxes isn’t a new idea. It’s been proposed before and always abandoned because it’s practically impossible to do without creating new avenues for tax avoidance.
Lower-paid service employees definitely deserve support. However, altering the tax code in this manner is a very leaky way of achieving that. It’s an approach that rich people with accountants and lawyers would surely be able to abuse. Fund managers, attorneys, and other high-paid professionals could easily reclassify their fees — or at the very least, some percentage of them — as mandatory tips for performance.
This proposal treats households with similar levels of income differently based on profession. Servers and bartenders, for example, receive a large portion of their income through tips and thus would receive a large tax exemption. Teaching assistants or health care workers might receive similar overall income but would not receive the same exemption.
Finally, these proposals create incentives to drive even more low-paid service employees into the tipped worker category, harming many workers and their families. Tipped workers have more unstable incomes than non-tipped workers, are more likely to live in poverty, and are more vulnerable to wage theft, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
The good news is that lawmakers have designed way better ways of helping working families. EPI and other experts on work and wages have put forth many ways to better help working families, from eliminating the sub-minimum wage that allows workers who receive tips to be paid a paltry $2.13 an hour, to raising all minimum wages above the $7.25 where it has been mired for a decade and a half, to making it easier for workers to unionize. In terms of tax solutions, lawmakers rightfully concerned about low-wage workers should instead consider expanding the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit (and especially making the latter stronger for workers without children in the home).
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Harris Urged to End Subminimum Wage, Not Just Taxes on Tips
"Focusing on tax relief distracts from the real solution: the need to end the subminimum wage, which is a direct legacy of slavery and contributes to the worst sexual harassment of any industry in America," said the president of One Fair Wage.
Aug 12, 2024
Economic justice advocates expressed appreciation for U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris' elevation of working class issues in her campaign at a rally in Las Vegas over the weekend, but called on the vice president to go beyond promises her Republican opponent has made and instead counter them with a plan to eliminate subminimum wages across the economy.
On Saturday, Harris expressed support for eliminating taxes for tips. The median tipped worker earns just $15,198 per year.
"It is my promise to everyone here when I am president, we will continue our fighting for working families of America including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers," said Harris.
The vice president's pledge came weeks after One Fair Wage (OFW), a grassroots group fighting for policies that would "require all employers to pay the full minimum wage," published a report showing that ending taxes on tips would not help many of the people earning subminimum wages, as people across the restaurant industry and hundreds of thousands of workers with disabilities do—partially because many of these workers don't earn enough to pay income taxes in the first place.
"It's encouraging to see the Harris-Walz campaign focusing on the economy and the needs of tipped workers," said Saru Jayaraman, president of OFW, on Sunday. "The fact is two-thirds of tipped workers don't earn enough to pay income tax—and that's because of the racist, sexist subminimum wage that really should be the focus of Harris and [vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim] Walz's ire."
The report published in July by OFW—Short Changed: Ending Income Taxes On Tips Will Not Make Subminimum Wages Livable—was aimed at debunking the claim by Republican nominee Donald Trump and other Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), that ending taxes on tips would meaningfully increase tipped workers' earnings.
A bill proposed by Cruz would leave out 95% of low- and middle-wage workers, the report noted, and "even among the one-third of tipped workers who would benefit from this tax relief, this tax relief would be experienced once a year at tax time, and would not relieve their need to pay rent and bills all year round."
Unlike exempting tipped workers from taxes, "providing these workers with a full, livable minimum wage with tips on top would significantly improve their economic stability and workplace safety," reads the report.
As Common Dreams reported in June, OFW dismissed Trump's pledge to eliminate income taxes on tips as "pandering" to low-income households, and the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 said that while "relief is definitely needed for tip earners... Nevada workers are smart enough to know the difference between real solutions and wild campaign promises."
David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, noted that the culinary union supports eliminating the subminimum wage for tipped workers, which Nevada did at the state level last year.
"If Harris was looking to counter Trump's no taxes on tips, she could've endorsed ending the subminimum wage, which is much better policy," said Dayen.
The culinary union announced its endorsement of Harris last Friday, ahead of the vice president's rally, saying its members believe Harris will "tackle issues that are important to guest room attendants who clean hotel rooms, cooks who make gourmet food, and the tip-earning servers who deliver cocktails and unparalleled hospitality."
The union noted on Sunday that Harris had also pledged at the rally to "raise the minimum wage across the country."
The Nevada Current reported on Monday that the union and other advocates for economic justice, including U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), "hope to capitalize on a popular proposal to eliminating taxes on tips to push for a federal ban on letting employers pay tipped workers subminimum wages."
Horsford told the outlet that he is working with other House members to draft a bill that would end the federal subminimum wage, which is $2.13 per hour for tipped workers.
"Some of these employers are trying to keep workers at poverty wages," he told the Current. "We need to break that. We need to break this idea that people can work for less than a fair minimum wage and for me that's a livable wage."
Supporting such legislation, said Jayaraman, "is where the Harris-Walz campaign can make their mark—and make a real, meaningful difference in the lives of tipped workers."
"Focusing on tax relief distracts from the real solution: the need to end the subminimum wage, which is a direct legacy of slavery and contributes to the worst sexual harassment of any industry in America," said Jayaraman. "The Harris-Walz campaign should be calling for all workers to be paid a livable minimum wage with tips on top."
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