A job is a ticket to society.

For centuries in our nation, people with disabilities have fought for their civil rights. The fight is not yet over.

On March 6, two young adults spoke about what their jobs mean to them.

They spoke at the Living Resources headquarters in Albany at a press conference organized by Assemblyman Phil Steck to support legislation he has proposed to require workers with disabilities be paid at least minimum wage.

Brendan Salmon, who described himself as “a young man with disabilities,” said, “I’ve been receiving services since I was born that have prepared me to be independent as I am today.”

With the help of a job coach who trains and supports him, Salmon has worked at St. Peter’s Hospital for seven years.

Abby Gail Censabella said, “I’m proud to say that I’m an adult with autism and learning disabilities.”

Her first job, before she found Living Resources, was at Subway, a fast-food chain that sells sandwiches.

“I was proud to be working but I struggled a lot,” she said. “The pace was fast, the expectations were high. I had difficulty processing instructions quickly and keeping up during busy shifts. I felt discouraged. I wanted to succeed, but unfortunately I was let go before I could make that happen.”

However, Living Resources “changed everything” for her, Censabella said. Through internships, she learned to “be responsible and dependable.”

A job coach taught her “how to get to work on time, how to communicate professionally, and how to manage expectations in the real workplace.”

She called a transportation class “life-changing.” Before Censabella took the class, she did not feel confident taking a bus on her own. “It felt overwhelming and intimidating but, with instructions and practice, I gained the confidence to travel independently to and from work,” she said. “That independence meant freedom. It meant opportunity. It meant I no longer had to rely on my parents to get somewhere that I needed to go.”

Today, Censabella has a job working with children that makes her proud, knowing she is making a difference in their lives — and earning a paycheck for it.

“I’m not just employed, I’m contributing, I’m independent. I am an adult building a life for myself so that, eventually, I can live on my own and start a family.”

Censabella said that the Living Resources program did more than teach job skills. “They give people a chance to succeed when you don’t think you can,” she said. “I stand here today not just as someone with autism but as proof that, with the right support system, we can work, we can contribute, and we can thrive.”

Her words, of course, spoke to universal human values. All of us have times when we feel overwhelmed and intimidated. But, with support and instruction, we can move on and become contributing members of society.

The civil rights struggle has been long and hard for disabled people in our nation. For much of our history, Americans with disabilities were segregated and discriminated against.

As Andrea Faville writes in her history of Americans with disabilities, “Citizens with disabilities often were treated like charity cases, tragedies or freaks. Unable to support themselves in the United States’ manufacturing and agriculture-based economy, people with disabilities frequently had to panhandle and live on the streets.

“Others had homes, but not of their choosing. They were forcibly committed to hospitals reserved for the disabled where their lives were governed by doctors and hospital staff. Some states passed laws forbidding people with disabilities from marrying or having children, which sometimes provoked forced sterilization.”

The two World Wars began to shift public perceptions as thousands of soldiers came home deaf, blind, or in wheelchairs. In the 1960s, people with disabilities, inspired by the Black civil rights movement, began to campaign for legal protection against discrimination. Slowly, through lobbying, protests and sheer persistence, Americans with disabilities challenged the power structures that preserved inequality.

“In 1962,” Faville writes, “Ed Roberts, a quadriplegic paralyzed from the neck down, became the first severely disabled student admitted to the University of California at Berkeley. Roberts’ admittance served as a turning point in the struggle for civil rights.”

Other disabled students petitioned for acceptance to major universities. Eventually, they banded together and secured federal funding for a program that helped disabled students live independently — outside a hospital.

Discrimination was still rampant, but the campaign for reform continued, gathering widespread support until, in 1990, Congress in a bi-partisan vote passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, guaranteeing Americans with disabilities equal access to jobs, government, commercial spaces such as office buildings and restaurants, transportation, and telecommunications.

But still, inequalities exist. And Steck, a Democrat from Colonie also representing part of Guilderland, has focused on one of them.

He proposed legislation last year that would require disabled workers to receive at least minimum wage.

At the March 6 press conference, Steck described touring “sheltered workshops” where people’s “real wage might even have been under a dollar an hour,” he said.

“This is an exploitative system,” said Steck. “It needs to end."

We agree, and believe that most New Yorkers are not even aware of it.

How could this be?

The federal legislation that makes a subminimum wage possible for disabled workers was passed in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

“It was a time when people with disabilities were often segregated from schools, workplaces, and community life with the assumption that segregation was permanent, and that people with disabilities were worth less,” said Lindsay Miller, the executive director of the New York Association of Independent Living. “That was 90 years ago.”

She went on, “We’ve come a long way in terms of employment services, workplace accommodations, assisted technology, and inclusive hiring practices. And it’s time that our laws in New York state catch up with our values.”

Statewide, about 1,500 people with disabilities are working in sheltered workshops, Miller said, earning less than minimum wage and some earning as little as $3 an hour.

“No one can build a life on that and no one should be told that their disability makes them worth less,” said Miller.

She noted that 16 states have already ended this discriminatory and exploitative practice.

So what is stopping New York from doing so?

Part of it, both Miller and Steck said, is that families who have grown children with disabilities are anxious about transitioning them from a sheltered situation to sustainable work.

“The transition requires employment services, including individualized support,” said Miller.

She described a pilot program run by her association, which helps people in sheltered workshops explore secure competitive jobs in the community by exposing them to various possibilities.

Miller gave the example of a man “with significant anxiety, especially around new people” who tried assembling wreaths and “was so focused and good at the work that he was doing that the employer actually offered him a job on the spot, at $18 an hour, with a flexible schedule that met his transportation needs.”

“When you meet people where they are, we provide the right resources to succeed,” said Miller.

Steck described another hurdle in passing his legislation that came from a seemingly unexpected source. The Assembly’s Labor Committee, Steck said, was “extremely supportive” of the bill, having “looked at all the studies throughout the United States.”

The bill then went to the Ways and Means Committee, supported by its chair, Steck said.

“However, unfortunately, there’s an organization in New York called the New York State Industries for the Disabled that makes money by referring people with disabilities to businesses to work at subminimum wage; they were lobbying against the bill and, because of their prestige as advocates for the disabled outside of this particular sector, it influenced some members to go in a different direction.”

The bill never made it to a floor vote.

Steck noted that the bill has bipartisan support and said, “The people who have the ability to move it forward beyond the Labor Committee need to step up and push for the bill to be passed.”

We urge them to do so. And we urge our readers to advocate for a change that is obviously right.

A study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association looking at two states, New Hampshire and Maryland, that had abolished subminimum wages found “improved employment-related outcomes in people with cognitive disabilities.”

Labor-force participation rose in both states following repeal.

As disabled people worked in equal paying, fully integrated jobs, their self-esteem and financial autonomy increased, other studies have shown. With proper support, workers with disabilities were just as productive as their peers.

A 2020 report from the United States Commission on Civil Rights found subminimum wage programs for disabled people are discriminatory and contribute to segregation of disabled workers from the larger workforce.

Further, the report found that, in the decade between 2010 and 2020, the majority of employers using the federal subminimum wage that were investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor had violated subminimum wage rules and were ordered to pay their employees back pay.

And very few disabled people working in sheltered workshops — 2.3 percent, a ProPublica investigation found — ever transition to regular employment.

So Phil Steck’s legislation is needed — but more. When California abolished use of subminimum wage, it created and funded a transition plan to help disabled workers find competitive integrated employment.

Supports for sheltered workshops that are currently funded through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act could be used by New York for programs that help disabled people access and maintain integrated employment.

Simply ending discrimination is not enough. We need to provide a path forward for people who have long been exploited.

Abby Gail Censabella’s life story can serve as our beacon. Programs like those offered by Living Resources, she said, “give people a chance to succeed when you don’t think you can.”

She offered herself as living proof that, “with the right support system, we can work, we can contribute, and we can thrive.”