Not to detract from them underpaying disabled people but I believe the picture is more complex than that. I used work with one Goodwill Industries to train their employees on computer repair. Most of these employees were staying in the job for 3-6 months and then moving on to more lucrative jobs. They were receiving on the job training and in some cases, job placement by Goodwill.

I concur, this is my experience too and the reason I am a big supporter of Goodwill.

I did not think the lowest hourly wage at my local organization anywhere were as low as cited in these comments but I don't know the specifics.

500K is very cheap for the leadership of an organization the size of Goodwill. Calling 500K "top dollar" for a 100,000 strong organization is ridiculous.

It drives me crazy when people complain about charity ceo pay. Half a million is a drop in the bucket compared to their actually expenses. If you reduce the ceo pay, you’ll find your ceo leaves every few months because they’re being offered ten times more somewhere else.

If their only incentive for working at a charity was the salary, isn't that perhaps the wrong motivation?

At the end of the day, people still need money and charities need competent people to head their operations. Charities can get away with comparative low pay, and some folks are fine taking a pay cut to work there - but they cannot pay poverty wages and expect someone to stay there either - because at the end of the day, it is still a job and still work. This doesn't change because it is a charity.

That same logic - wrong motivation - can be applied to non-charities. Should doctors and nurses take low pay because they should be motivated to help people instead of focusing on salary? Are teachers wrong for leaving teaching because they aren't paid well, especially at first?

Yeah, that's like high-end city manager pay.

Sub-minimum wage pay is obviously bad, but why does everyone seem to think that non-profit CEOs shouldn't get competitive salaries? Goodwill has tens of thousands of employees and something like $6 billion in annual revenue. Anyone with the demonstrated skills and experience to run an organization of that scale could earn a very generous compensation package in the private sector.

> "why does everyone seem to think that non-profit CEOs shouldn't get competitive salaries?"

Because the only places they can get salaries from is the donors who think they are donating to help the charity cases. Donating "$2 to save a child's life" and then finding you donated a quarter millionth of the salary which keeps the CEO in the 1% of earners, sucks.

Why should CEOs anywhere get significant salaries? The gap between the lowest and highest paid position always matters, non profit or not.

Why does the gap between lowest and highest paid workers at a company matter?

For example, if you took a company and split it into two companies, one with the higher paid half of the workforce and one with the lower paid, would that be improving the world?

Because it implies an unequal distribution of the profits from the labor people invest in the company.

And splitting the company in two like you proposed would almost certainly result in some pretty big changes, as one company would be all workers and the other would be all bosses.

This doesn't feel like the right analysis. Goodwill is a non-profit. For most non-profits the bottom pay is $0.

It's really weird to compare Goodwill since it exists in this weird kind of neutral space between a business and a charity.

Have worked in places that had these arrangements.

Hell I spent a year disabled myself.

These people are not worth minimum wage.

Huge amount of supervision needed.

There needs be ways for people to earn some money

If they aren't worth minimum wage, they wouldn't get hired to begin with.

If they are worth hiring, they are worth minimum wage, even with supervision. You get what you pay for. Pay more money if you want more competent workers.

They may have some value working, but it may be very little.

Feed the birds. A 5 minute job. Hour later they come back. You HAVE to go check because much of the time it’s screwed up and needs to be redone. Would never hire this person at minimum wage.

High minimum wage eliminates many people from consideration.

This doesn't make sense. Consider right now, in the restaurant industry in the US.

Resaurants are increasing their pay. These are for jobs like McDonalds. The kind of jobs that people always use to point out work that is trivial, and shouldn't be paid minimum wage...

And yet, they are paying more than minimum wage. Why? Because McDonalds is a 143.8 billion dollar company. They aren't worth that much because they are running charity. They make that much money from selling fries.

So even if you think that fry cook is stupid and has to have their work double checked, who cares? If they weren't there, then you couldn't sell the fries to begin with. And then how will you make 143.8 billion dollars?

The simple fact that the company has such value should make it obvious that the frycook is producing more value than they are paid.

Not that straightforward. I know of a friend whose autistic son "works" for GoodWill. The friend loves to have her son to volunteer without pay at all, and she knows the payment is just a gesture. Exploiting? No. That's actually helping.

this is exactly it. sheltered workplaces exist purely to provide a sense of community and actual value to people with disabilities lives. While some of us begrudge working the 9-5, there are a lot of people excluded from the societal norm of the day to day. With the costs of running Sheltered Workplaces far outweighing the income produced (and no expectation for it ever to) these are considered positive expenses for most communities.

The modern view is that they are sweatshops, and most of them are being shut down. https://www.paraquad.org/blog/lets-reform-sheltered-workshop...

I'm not sure if the real issue there was the foster and medical system in America 30 years or so ago or the sheltered workshop. Each sheltered workshop (Australian Disability Enterprises) I have volunteered with or worked with has been funded privately and/or run at a loss. They are not able to shunt a child with a disability into a position where they are sorting nuts and bolts etc. The other choice for a lot of these employees is to stay home or attend care centers. There are more benefits to including people in a work environment than excluding, even if it means creating one for them specifically.

In general, there’s an ongoing debate over whether sheltered workshops represent a social service to people with disabilities, allowing them to perform work even if they are essentially not paid for it, or if they are exploitative and discriminatory because they don’t pay a fair wage. I think it’s a complex issue, but I tend to come down with the people with disabilities who speak out against them (nothing about us, without us).

This again appears a system issue, not workshop issue. In a lot of the statements I have seen against the programs on offer here in Aus, were from people incorrectly assessed as being appropriate for sheltered workplaces. Appropriate medical assessment/intervention/care could result in a few instances of people being assessed job capable outside of the ADE but this in itself is a fault in a system that has one option of being ADE employment.

The discussion around it seems incredibly emotional to purposefully distort the opinion of people that ADE/SW are sweatshops or some Dickensian nightmare. I guess profit driven societies have taken advantage of it, like they have with the jail systems, education, law enforcement, military, healthcare...

edited - outcome>option

People seem to have some questions about my comment, here’s a much more detailed analysis: https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2009/06/...

In short, the DOJ has generally contended in the past decade or so that sheltered workshops represent discrimination based on disability, and has been suing to shut them down or force them to pay their employees minimum wage.

This is mostly argument with regards to legal matters though, not actual outcomes of those with severe disabilities. Most sheltered workshops will shut down before being able to pay employees minimum wage. For those that legitimately are incapable of holding down a normal job, they will then have nothing. And having a job has repeatedly been shown to improve outcomes for the disabled.

I think this is a problem that doesn't have a single right answer. Either way some people will get the short end of the stick.

Exploiting is a tricky word, the argument that they have used in the past is that they more or less employ them as a charity and if they had to pay normal minimum wages would not.

I don't know the specifics of what people were making, but when I was working at Burger King in college we had a disabled person who did approximately nothing, and had a caretaker in the lobby waiting for the shift to end the whole time. But it was good for him to get out and interact with people.

Is goodwill a publicly traded company? I always assumed it was a charity so surprised to find out it’s a corporation. Assuming it’s not publicly traded the salaries would have to be higher than normal CEOs who get most of their contribution from stock options. Obviously this doesn’t apply if you think all CEOs don’t deserve their current pay level. But assuming that’s not you, I wouldn’t be too concerned with 500K “executives pay” even if that is an individuals compensation. There are Goodwills in every city I’ve been too, they need a competitor leadership team.

Paying some of its disabled employees less than minimum wage is an out of context character attack as well. These are government programs to employ the otherwise unemployable. Most employers refuse to take part in the program. Large low skill employers like famously McDonalds and Walmart but clearly also here Goodwill take part and give these people jobs paying them the government funds. We shouldn’t be throwing shade at companies like Goodwill for giving people with Down’s syndrome employment but instead be throwing shade at companies like Goldman Sachs for not doing it.

Charities are often corporations. Corporation doesn't mean for-profit, and it doesn't mean publicly traded. At its core it just means "an organization that is legally treated as a unit". Goodwill is not publicly traded (since, as a non-profit, that wouldn't make much sense).

> I always assumed it was a charity so surprised to find out it’s a corporation

It is a charity. Most charities are corporations (pretty much anything with an identity that isn’t a government of a facade for an individual is a corporation, LLC, or partnership of some kind, and charities can’t be partnerships or individuals, and I’m not sure about LLCs but even if they can be there probably is no reason to.