‘Abuse’ Raises Question About Law for Disabled Workers
by Christina Jewett , ProPublica - March 20, 2009 9:15 am EDT
A scandal rocking an Iowa town of barely 250 has ballooned into a statewide story. But it has national implications.
Last month, FBI agents, social services and health department officials in Iowa converged on a 106-year-old bunkhouse. It’s where dozens of mentally retarded men lived when they were not working for as little as 37 cents per hour gutting turkeys in a processing plant, according to news <1> reports and documents <2> released by state officials.
Some of the men had been working at the plant and living at the company-owned bunkhouse since the 1970s. The arrangement grew out of a Depression-era federal law that allows employers to pay disabled workers less than the minimum wage. Roughly 400,000 workers are currently covered by the law.
The 21 men in question are Texans who work for a company called Henry’s Turkey Service. According to reports <1> in the Des Moines Register, Henry’s took advantage of a section of the labor law that allows the company to pay lower than minimum wage to disabled workers – and to deduct their living expenses from their pay.
Henry’s, a Texas company, in the 1970s started taking the deinstitutionalized men to Iowa, where they worked at a plant owned by West Liberty Foods <3>, one of the nation’s largest turkey processors.
West Liberty released a statement <4> to the Register saying it had an "agreement" with the turkey service and played no role in housing the men or paying their wages. Turkey service owner Kenneth J. Henry declined to comment but referred ProPublica to his attorney.
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http://www.propublica.org/article/abuse-raises-question-about-law-for-disabled-workers-0320