questioning authority

I don't understand how more people aren't upset with the system or why more people don't do something about it. During my winter quarter of school this year, my teacher challenged me to write about why my non-profit job should or shouldn't pay people with disabilities less than minimum wage. My initial reaction was that my company can afford it and it's a discriminatory anyway, applied to only people with disabilities and prison populations. However, upon researching it, I found all sorts of reasons why it's wrong.

I'm not surprised that my company doesn't want to pay the people with disabilities minimum wage. The feds say they don't have to and they've been paying less than minimum since 1938 so why would they change? However, the feds position is surprisingly outdated and unjustified. They'll look back on this in shame before too long. I can't see how they can't see that.

As part of my job, I had to go to a class put on by the department of labor today about how to go about "fairly" paying people less than minimum wage. Someone asked if they could get people with disabilities a job at a big box store and then have the big box store pay them less than minimum wage. The trainers said no, the big box store cannot use a non-profit's 501c3 status. However, they offered that the non-profit could get the person a job at the big box store, pay them less than minimum, and then bill the big box store and that way everyone can benefit on exploiting this individual...except for the individual.

This training was supposed to last all day. However, due to the lousy set-up and the fact that we knew all of it, (not mention the fact that it was greatly upsetting me), our boss let us bail after 5 hours which was still 5 hours too long.

It's just shocking. I expect this attitude from an older generation (like my superiors at work) because it's the way they've always done things. Like old slave owners, it doesn't make it right but they are just repeating the behavior they were taught. However, my trainers were all younger and not willing to talk about the fact that initiatives are being proposed to eliminate sub-minimum wage. I hope more reasonable people start making better decisions. I'm going to keep working on people to hope they see their errors.