A woman who bought a glass vase for $3.99 at a local Goodwill charity shop has seen the piece auctioned off for more than $100,000 after it turned out to be a rare and valuable piece of Italian glassware.
Jessica Vincent had bought the item at a Goodwill thrift store in Hanover county, Virginia, and had an inkling that it might have been worth a little more than was usual, she told the New York Times.
“I had a sense that it might be a $1,000 or $2,000 piece, but I had no clue how good it actually was until I did a little bit more research,” she told the paper after noticing a small ‘M’ on its bottom which she suspected might stand for Murano, an Italian island near Venice famed for glasswork.
The optics of paying disabled people shit wages is not good, but consider that those workers are otherwise unemployable. Goodwill is probably still losing money on a lot of them even with the super low wage.
If you force a higher wage, goodwill is simply going to replace them with abled people who can do the job much more efficiently and reliably.
The idea is that people under these circumstances should already be fully supported by disability pay (yes I know disability pay is broken right now, I’m talking about ideally here) or a guardian or caregiver, and their goodwill job is something for them to do to help with socialization, practice doing hands on tasks, and getting some pocket money.
If disabled people are struggling to make ends meet because they make $4/hr at goodwill, that’s a failure of our society at taking care of a less abled person, not goodwill. Nobody whose only option is to work at goodwill due to disability should need to be working at all. I’m not a Marxist but some level of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” isn’t a bad thing.
I do have other bones to pick with goodwill, but I’m pretty neutral on the disabled workers thing.
Yeah, I mentioned in a comment below but I agree with what you say. And as far as I’m aware, if you qualify for this less-than-minimum wage, you’re also entitled to a number of other safety nets. People who are mentally and physically able to work presumably wouldn’t be getting paid this rate; folks who have some mental or physical impairment that prevents them from working (and at the same time entitled them to disability, amongst other things), would.
So yeah, lots of words saying I agree.