I’m going to give people a bit of education here. The subminimum wage is actually legal here in Australia, disgusting as it is. Yes, that person working in that sweatshop packaging Qantas headphones or unpacking stinking recycled clothes from the Sammy’s bin can be paid as little as a few bucks an hour. The ‘minimum wage’ only applies to humans, you see. The unions have been silent on this for decades. And our government is secretly planning to return to block funding or ‘commissioning arrangements’ under their new ‘social investment model’. Many of the big providers who are running sheltered workshops are in a so called ‘Quality’ trial - most are Ability First Australia companies, handpicked from hundreds and thousands of providers to 44 key megacharities. About half are the Ability First Australia mob. Why not more? There are only 26 of them. The ones that appear in the paper, often for abuse and neglect especially during the Disability RC, and now for their ‘quality’. Even the ones with recent penalties for being shit. Ability WA, Achieve Australia, Aruma, Berry Street Yooralla, Cara, Carpentaria, Cerebral Palsy Alliance, CPL, Cootharinga, Endeavour Foundation, genU, Life Without Barriers, Melba Support Services, Minda, MSWA, Northcott, Novita, Rocky Bay, Scope, Somerville, St Giles, Sunnyfield, Sylvanvale, The Disability Trust, Unisson and Vertaview Group are the Ability First Australia mob. The wages? Yes, it’s fact. The current Supported Employment Services Award still permits a supported employee to be paid as little as $3.31 an hour under the Supported Wage System. It also now has transitional supported-employment Grades A and B at $8.32 and $16.65 an hour respectively from 30 June 2026. Which is still under the min wage. But there is something even more important than the $8.32 Grade A rate. The award still allows a disabled worker to be paid a percentage of the ordinary classification rate according to an assessment of their “productive capacity”. Clause 15.4 sends those workers to the Supported Wage System in Schedule D. They used to explicitly call it ‘abled time’. I know at least three men with PhDs who had been paid $3 an hour to stuff envelopes. We don’t talk about it because shame. Of those I’ve found who run sheltered workshops from the Quality (lol) trials, they are listed below: Ability WA, Aruma, Scope, Yooralla, The Disability Trust, Sylvanvale, Orana and Valley Industries are ‘quality supports’ grantees and run sheltered workshops. Ditto Rocky Bay and PeopleKind. Under Schedule D, the worker gets the higher of: their assessed productivity percentage × the relevant award wage, or $3.31 an hour. So $3.31 per hour is presently the hard minimum under the Supported Wage System. There is expressly no minimum weekly amount. That means, for example, someone assessed at 10% productivity against the $25.74 Grade 1 rate would mathematically produce $2.574/hour, so the statutory floor kicks in and they receive $3.31/hour. Someone assessed at 20% would receive $5.15/hour. At 30%, $7.72/hour. At 50%, $12.87/hour. Only at 100% productivity would they get the full $25.74 Grade 1 rate. TLDR: Royal Commission majority recommended ending segregated employment and subminimum wages by 2034 governments left that recommendation “subject to further consideration” meanwhile the NDIA has hand-picked several organisations that themselves operate supported-employment/ADE/social-enterprise models to participate in its invitation-only “Quality Supports” pilots that will help shape future NDIS pricing. I will fight to the death over this issue, which I regard as modern slavery. Check the assets and financials of those big ‘charities’. And that, my dear friends, is why your shoes are cheaper at Kmart. gimpled.blogspot.com/2014/10…