labor lawAdivision of labor law center

We’re going to see a bunch of this—that no new news has come out about the District of Columbia’s minimum wage since it last went up in January 2006. But no news is sometimes good news, and old news is still once in a while worthy of a little rehashing in order to keep it fresh in our minds and in our memories.

The deal with the District of Columbia minimum wage is that it went up on January 1, 2006 to $7 per hour for all employees of private companies in the capital area. The increase was brought about by the Minimum Wage Act of 2004. the act also covers the overtime rule in the District of Columbia, which states that any employee who works more than 40 hours in a week needs to get paid at least one and a half times their normal wages for those hours and minutes spent working over those 40 hours.

And the District of Columbia minimum wage law, as passed in 2004 and increased in 2006, contains special provisions to exclude handicapped workers from having to receive the full minimum wage. I bring this up because of all the attention that this issue is getting in Arizona at the moment, where the new Arizona minimum wage law passed last November had left out an exclusion for handicapped and disabled folks.

In the case of the District of Columbia minimum wage law, though, disabled folks can get paid less by their employers as long as that employer got authorization beforehand from the U.S. Department of Labor and has proof of this certificate. Then they can pay the disabled person a fair amount based on the person’s productivity at work. As we saw in Arizona, these disabled folks are sometimes hired more for their own good than for the employer’s.

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