It is eminently logical that the nation's first school for blind children should also have been the first to confront the problem of what to do about graduates, equipped with wage-earning skills, who found every employment door closed to them. In 1840, eight years after founding what was then called the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, Samuel Gridley Howe established a "separate work department" at the school. It was the nation's first example of what later came to be called the sheltered workshop, an idea that came to provide succeeding generations of handicapped people not only with employment but with the gratification of self-support. As Howe put it: "In this department the blind feel perfectly independent, being assured of the bread they eat; and if any surplus remains to them, it is far more prized than would be ten times the amount of alms."
Howe hit upon one other basic characteristic that remained constant for well over a century. The workshop was "not intended to be a source of gain to the Institution; on the contrary, it must be a pecuniary loss at the outset; it is wholly for the benefit of the individuals who work in it. … "
The innovation was soon duplicated by several other early schools for the blind. They found, as did Perkins after a few years, that education of the young and an employment enterprise for adults did not really belong under the same roof. The workshops were ultimately separated from the schools and came under the management of voluntary organizations for the adult blind and, later, of state agencies. Perkins held out longer than most; its workshop, though moved to separate premises, did not close until 1952.
Because there was little public transportation in those early years, the men and women engaged in the workshops had to be housed nearby, so boarding homes were established for them. Then, too, newly blinded adults who had not attended schools for the blind had to learn the necessary personal adjustment and work skills, so the workshops took on a training function. They slowly turned into institutions. Tracing the development of the workshop movement in As I Saw It, Robert Irwin noted:
In some instances those entering the institutions came with the understanding that they would remain for only two or three years, while they were learning their trades. But when the training period was over, their home connection had often been broken and there was no place for them to go except to the county poor farms. Often they were permitted to remain in the institution for many years, so that it became difficult eventually to say whether the institution was a training school, a working home, or just a refuge for aged blind people.
This diffusion of focus troubled those who were attempting to modernize work for the blind; their solution was to establish day workshops. Irwin credited Eben P. Morford of the Industrial Home for the Blind in Brooklyn and Charles W. Holmes of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind with leadership in this development. Eventually the combination boarding home and workshop all but disappeared.
For the most part, the early workshops produced simple, handmade objects that were in everyday use, could be manufactured out of easily obtained materials, and could be sold in local markets. A 1908 survey of the 16 workshops then in existence revealed that the majority were principally engaged in broom-making, with chair-caning and hand weaving the other two main activities. These 16 workshops did a gross annual business of $311,000. They employed 583 blind workers whose total wages came to $102,500—an average of just over $3.00 per week per person. It was hardly a living wage, even in those days. But then, workshops were not expected to yield a living wage; they were subsidized by their sponsoring agencies, and the blind person whose family could not supply the difference between his earnings and his needs usually received a small cash supplement from the agency.
The first sizable opportunity for blind people with good skills to move out of the workshops came during World War I, when several hundred were employed in war factories. Only a handful were kept on after the armistice, however, and many of those returning to the workshops were no longer ready to accept their conditions and wages. There was another problem, too. The workshops had kept going during the war with whatever personnel they could muster; these were, for the most part, low-skilled, often multihandicapped persons, many incapable of meeting even minimal production standards. One way or another, some people were bound to be crowded out once the wartime industrial workers came back to the shops.
This situation—which was to be repeated in heightened form following World War II—was at the heart of the dilemma that perennially troubled the leadership in work for the blind. What should be the basic function of a workshop? Should it be primarily a training school to fit people for employment in open industry? Should it be a self-supporting production unit, able to compete in the open market with commercial firms? Should it be an outright social service, a work therapy setting for those blind people who could never realistically be expected to pull their economic weight? Should it combine all three functions?
Opinion on these thorny questions was sharply divided during the Twenties and, to a certain extent, continues to remain divided despite the striking transformations that workshops for the blind have undergone in succeeding decades.
One transformation began in 1929 with the passage of the Hawes-Cooper Act (Public Law 77-669). This piece of legislation had been sought for twenty years by labor unions, citizen bodies, and manufacturers' associations who were attempting to halt the deadly competition of convict labor. Prison-made merchandise, often produced under contract with outside firms, was flooding a number of markets. With prisoners paid as little as 14 cents a day, their products could be profitably sold at prices far below anything free labor could afford. It was a substantial threat. Prison output in the late Twenties was valued at some $50 million a year.
One of the industries affected by convict labor competition was broom manufacturing. In joining the multi-industry drive that would keep the products of prison shops off the free market by restricting their sale to "state use" (i.e., use in governmental departments and institutions), the broom manufacturers thought it advantageous to enlist the support of the workshops for the blind. They were not overly concerned about competition from the workshops, whose cost of manufacture was not too different from their own and thus did not present the same price-cutting threat as prison labor. The Eastern Broom Manufacturers and Supply Dealers Association even sweetened the pot by declaring themselves in favor of having "state use" brooms reserved for manufacture by the workshops for the blind. Although this was a more or less self-serving action, to the extent that blind-made brooms would thereby be deflected from the open market, the workshops were willing enough to accept this industry concession. Many years later, a knowledgeable observer was to comment that, had the broom manufacturers had any conception of how large this "state use" business was destined to become during World War II and thereafter, they would not so readily have yielded it to the workshops for the blind.
The Hawes-Cooper Act, when it finally became law in January 1929, did not represent a complete answer to the convict labor problem, but it did divest prison-made goods of their interstate character by making them subject to the laws of the various states. The Act did not become effective for five years. As the deadline date neared, a national committee was formed to promote passage of the necessary state laws. These laws had to do two things: (1) provide that all goods produced by prisoners within the state would be used by the state itself and kept off the consumer market; and (2) prohibit the importation of convict-made goods from other states. The national committee, which had representation from the American Federation of Labor and the General Federation of Women's Clubs as well as from the various manufacturing associations, invited Peter J. Salmon of the Industrial Home for the Blind and Charles B. Hayes of the Foundation to become members.
Salmon, who at that time was also president of the New York State Federation of Workers for the Blind, had played a signal role in the passage of the Hawes-Cooper Act. His agency operated one of the nation's largest workshops for the blind; its major product was brooms. In the course of pressing for passage of the Act, he had met and formed a firm friendship with James V. Bennett, then federal commissioner of prison industries in the Department of Justice's Bureau of Prisons. It was a friendship that would stand the blind in good stead a few years later.
Salmon's appearance to testify before the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee's 1928 hearings on the Hawes-Cooper Act had had a dramatic effect. An affable, blue-eyed, fair-haired Irishman, whose open-faced countenance with its dimpled pink cheeks bespoke a genuinely gregarious personality, the witness—then in his early thirties—conducted himself like anything but the stereotype of a blind man. Using braille notes, he stood up confidently at a lectern to read a statement in his cheerful, Boston-accented voice. Seated behind him, the committee chairman, Senator James E. Watson of Indiana, dabbed at tear-filled eyes. The senator had a blind brother. It was not on the grounds of sympathy, however, that Peter Salmon made an impact. He was and would be a doughty fighter for the cause to which he had dedicated his career.
The Hawes-Cooper Act had specifically excluded goods manufactured in federal prisons from its ban on interstate shipments. The federal institution specializing in broom manufacture was Leavenworth Penitentiary; under an executive order, its entire broom output was purchased by federal departments, which then met any additional needs through purchases in the open market. Workshops for the blind were among the bidders for this open market business, and this gave rise to a serious problem. In their struggle to survive in the straitened economic conditions of the depression, the workshops were competing to a disastrous degree by undercutting each other's prices.
At its 1933 convention, the American Association of Workers for the Blind named Salmon to head a committee whose charge was to "work in cooperation with the American Foundation for the Blind for the purpose of establishing a code of fair practices [in] the various phases of work among workshops for the blind." The resolution was a follow-up to steps taken the previous year by the Foundation, which had convened two regional conferences of workshop managers in an effort to resolve the more serious causes of friction among them.
There was also another pressing reason for the adoption of such a code. The National Recovery Act (NRA), passed by Congress in the first year of the New Deal administration, had called for the establishment in all industries of fair labor practice codes, including minimum wages and maximum hours. The sheltered workshops, both those for the blind and those for persons with other handicaps, had taken the position that, as non-commercial organizations, they could not be expected to meet such minimum wage requirements. General Hugh S. Johnson, the National Recovery Administrator, named a special commission to examine the workshop question and subsequently issued an order which recognized the unique situation of the sheltered workshops as "charitable institutions … conducted not for profit but for the purpose of providing remunerative employment for physically, mentally or socially handicapped workers." The order granted all workshops exemption from the NRA industry codes on several conditions. Most important was that they agree not to engage in "destructive price cutting or any other unfair method of competition."
Although the National Recovery Act was later declared unconstitutional, the principle it established of exempting sheltered workshops from minimum wage laws was preserved in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and subsequent federal labor laws. In somewhat modified form, it was still in effect in 1972 despite the repeated efforts of organizations of blind people to have it overthrown.
Once the Randolph-Sheppard Act had embodied into law a precedent for granting some blind people special opportunities for self-support through vending stand operation, the time seemed ripe to seek federal help for the even larger group of blind men and women whose only source of livelihood came through the sheltered workshops. In March 1937 Peter Salmon wrote M.C. Migel: "I don't think that the Foundation could possibly do anything that would result in more jobs for the blind in a shorter period of time than to pursue this proposition of getting the Federal and State Governments to purchase brooms and possibly mops from the blind."
The most strategic approach was to use an already established entree. James V. Bennett had just been promoted to the directorship of the federal Bureau of Prisons. Salmon set up a meeting for himself, Migel, and Irwin at Bennett's office. Just how, they asked, could the workshops for the blind go about securing the federal broom business? Recognizing Bennett's obligation to protect prison interests, the trio explained that "first we would like to secure the open market orders, and later it [is] our hope that through the cooperation of the Department of Justice, we might gradually take over the entire requirements of the Federal Government."
Bennett was receptive to this approach. His opinion was that legislation would be the most feasible path to follow, and he gave helpful advice on how a law should be framed.
A measure along the suggested lines was drafted and, in July, introduced in Congress by two New York Democrats. In the Senate the bill's sponsor was Robert F. Wagner, then completing his second term as a senator following a political career that had begun with his election to the New York State Assembly in 1905. On the House side, the bill was introduced by Congresswoman Caroline O'Day, also a second-termer on the Hill. Both legislators had the ear of Franklin D. Roosevelt; Mrs. O'Day was also a close personal friend of Mrs. Roosevelt.
The Wagner bill was referred to the Senate's Committee on Interstate Commerce; Mrs. O'Day's went to the House Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Department. As a matter of routine practice, both committees solicited the views of the various government departments whose purchasing policies would be affected by the bills. Replies were slow in coming in, however, and Congress adjourned before they were all in hand, which meant that hearings on the bills would have to go over to the following year.
The interval was constructively employed by the bill's advocates. Migel, Salmon, and Irwin used the time to see to it that all key political fences were in good repair. They secured promises of cooperation from A.F.L. and C.I.O. representatives in Washington; they talked to members of Congress and to the heads of various federal bureaus, and constantly touched base with James V. Bennett.
The amended bill, as reported out by the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee and subsequently passed, was called "An Act to Create a Committee on Blind-Made Products and for Other Purposes." Its major provisions were these:
The President of the United States would appoint a Committee on Purchases of Blind-Made Products, to be made up of one representative each of six government departments (Navy, War, Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce and Interior) plus "a private citizen conversant with the problems incident to the employment of the blind."
The committee would "determine the fair market price of all brooms and mops and other suitable commodities manufactured by the blind and offered for sale to the Federal Government by any non-profit-making agency for the blind." It would make all necessary rules and regulations concerning such transactions, including "authorization of a central non-profit-making agency to facilitate the distribution of orders among the agencies for the blind."
The bill mandated that "all brooms and mops and other suitable commodities hereafter procured in accordance with applicable Federal specifications by or for any Federal Department or agency shall be procured from such non-profit-making agencies for the blind … at the price determined by the Committee to be the fair market price," except when brooms and mops were available from the Federal prison industries or were procured for use outside the continental United States.
As originally drafted, the bill referred only to brooms and mops. It was the committee that added "and other suitable commodities" and it was this phrase that opened vistas workers for the blind had not dared dream of.
Just about the only opposition to the Wagner-O'Day Act came, not from any legislator or government bureau, but from one man who held a unique and more or less solitary position in the ranks of workers for the blind. He was Dr. Merle E. Frampton, principal of the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind, who wrote to Senator Wagner and to Senator Burton K. Wheeler, chairman of the Interstate Commerce Committee, expressing strenuous objection on several grounds.
He alleged that workers for the blind had not been adequately consulted about the measure. The bill's "most objectionable" feature was that it granted authority to a non-profit agency to centralize and distribute government orders. No one agency, he said, should be allowed such a controlling role; it would lead to "favoritism and malpractice." There was no reason, in his opinion, to change the existing system of open competitive bidding for government orders; if, however, a central allocation agency was indeed to be designated, it should be "an organization not immediately engaged in work for the blind." A few other arguments were advanced, all leading to the insistent plea that the bill be withdrawn and not reintroduced until a nationwide conclave of all agencies for the blind could consider it.
Frampton sent copies of his letters to Robert Irwin, who replied with a patient explanation of how thoroughly the proposed legislation had in fact been discussed by the field as a whole: at the preceding AAWB national convention, at a convention of the New York State Federation of Workers for the Blind, at meetings of the Greater New York Council of Agencies for the Blind, at conferences with workshop managers and with the legislative committees of both AAWB and AAIB. Irwin also detailed the repeated consultations held with the Bureau of Prisons, the federal Budget Bureau, the Treasury's procurement officers, the purchasing departments of the military services.
Just what Frampton was after was never spelled out. His position as head of a school for blind children hardly qualified him to be a spokesman for the workshops, which were operated by agencies for the adult blind. But Merle Frampton was not content merely to be an authority on education; he was unwilling to recognize that the torch of leadership in work for the blind had passed from the elite hands of the school superintendents to the control of wider and more representative groups.
Because Merle Frampton will be encountered again—almost always in an adversary role—a brief discussion of his background may prove enlightening.
In 1938, when he was attempting single-handedly to kill the Wagner-O'Day bills, Frampton was still relatively new in work for the blind. He had been appointed three years earlier to succeed Edward M. Van Cleve as head of the New York Institute, a large, influential, and venerable school for the blind. His background was in general education and theology. A graduate of Boston University, with a Ph.D. from Harvard and a LL.D from the College of the Ozarks, he had been associate dean of Boston University's School of Religious Education and Social Service and, later, vice-president of the College of the Ozarks. None of his past experience was in the field of blindness.
Frampton's usual public stance was that of a philosopher and theoretician whose lofty views transcended the narrow interests of his colleagues in work for the blind. His first appearance on the national scene had been unfortunate. Invited to give a paper at the 1935 AAWB convention, he had proposed an elaborate scheme for the creation of segregated colonies of blind people—"self contained communities" in which "all the economic functions which can be performed by the visually handicapped are performed by visually handicapped people, and where sighted competition is not permitted." Acknowledging that this plan would limit association of blind people with the sighted, he questioned whether
the visually handicapped man needs as much so-called sighted intellectual and social contact as we sighted people assume. … Quite the contrary is probably the case. The visually handicapped person needs more and more to build his own world, which can be for him a much happier and more fruitful and probably quite a different world than that in which many of our sighted people live.
Propounded by a rank newcomer at a time when most leaders in work for the blind were moving ever more purposefully toward greater integration of blind people with the sighted, this proposal created a considerable uproar. It was to be thrown up at Frampton many times in the years to come, as he pursued his self-appointed role as dissenter.
Despite his unpopularity with co-workers, however, he ranked high with his school's board of trustees and retained his position as principal of the New York Institute until retirement early in 1971.
In any event, Frampton's effort to halt passage of the Wagner-O'Day Act proved futile. The bill had already been reported out by the Interstate Commerce Committee and on March 31, 1938, was passed by the Senate.
In the House of Representatives, Mrs. O'Day's bill encountered a rather different series of obstacles. To begin with, according to Robert Irwin's first-hand account:
The Committee on Executive Department Expenditures was quite inactive. Few bills were referred to it. The chairman [John J. Cochran of Missouri] was not in good health and the committee seldom met. … It happened that the committee had before it a bill which the chairman did not like. It was sponsored by certain women's clubs, and required the Army to put its superannuated horses and mules out to pasture for life, instead of killing them as had been common practice. The chairman felt that this was sentimental, and would have none of it.
[As a consequence, the O'Day bill] lay neglected in the files of the committee. The chairman would not say why he would not call a meeting, but everyone knew it was the superannuated horse bill. … If the committee met, the pressure from women's clubs would make it necessary for the committee to act on that bill. … Finally, however, sufficient pressure was mustered to get both bills reported out with a recommendation for passage.
By the time the superannuated horses were on their way to pasture, it was April 25, about six weeks before Congress was scheduled to adjourn. In the House there were two "unanimous consent" days left. The first time the O'Day bill came up on the consent calendar, obstacle number two arose from an unexpected quarter. Again from Irwin:
Congressman Hamilton Fish, who usually favored bills benefitting the blind, for some reason did not like this bill—probably because it was sponsored by two New Deal Democrats from his own state. Therefore, when it came up he shouted from the back of the room something about the New Deal not being satisfied with regimenting everybody else "and now it's trying to regiment the blind." Illogical as the argument was, it constituted a vote against the bill.
What seemed to be the bill's last chance came two weeks later, on the session's final unanimous consent calendar. Congressional rules at the time were that a unanimous consent bill which had drawn a negative vote could be considered one more time. On that final consent day, the calendar was so crowded that the committee in charge ruled that no previously rejected bill would be allowed to come up.
There remained one parliamentary device that might work; on the last day of Congress, there could be a request from the floor for suspension of the rules in order that a particular bill could be taken up. Passage under such suspension had to be unanimous. It was the speaker of the House, William B. Bankhead of Alabama, who suggested this procedure when a distressed Irwin appealed to him for help in getting the O'Day bill passed before Congress adjourned. Bankhead, who never missed a public opportunity to "point with pride" to Helen Keller as a fair daughter of his state, promised that he would recognize a motion from the floor to suspend the rules before thumping his gavel to signal adjournment.
Came the last day of Congress, June 12, and Irwin was in the visitors' gallery at 9 a.m. Adjournment was scheduled for noon. Irwin was uneasy. Mrs. O'Day, absent because she was ill, had delegated her role to a freshman New York congressman, James J. Lanzetta. The latter, according to Irwin, "knew very little about the bill, knew less about this special procedure, and was very obviously nervous about the whole matter." As the morning wore on, Irwin sought out the then Democratic floor leader, Sam Rayburn. Suppose Bankhead forgot? Rayburn advised him to relax; if the Speaker had promised to get the bill through, he would deliver.
Bankhead had instructed Lanzetta he would signal him when to move for suspension of the rules. When, by eleven o'clock, no signal had been given, Irwin went back to Rayburn, imploring him to send a reminder to the Speaker. Irwin's published account says that he was "brushed off with the assurance that if the Speaker promised to take care of the bill he would not forget." What Irwin did not relate was the nature of the brush-off. Many years later Peter Salmon told a Congressional hearing that Rayburn had threatened Irwin with bodily harm if pestered one more time.
In any event, just before adjournment Lanzetta finally got his signal, was given the floor, and offered a somewhat muddled explanation of the O'Day measure. Clarifying assistance came from Congressman Matthew Dunn, but the greatest help came from Bankhead who, ignoring some commotion from anti-New Dealers in the back of the room, proclaimed: "Hearing no objection, I declare the bill passed." The Wagner-O'Day Act thus survived its somewhat ludicrous voyage through the shoals of Congress. It was signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 25, 1938, as Public Law 739 of the 75th Congress.
Even before the President affixed his signature, the Foundation called a meeting of workshop managers to discuss how the new law was to be implemented. Two key conclusions were reached. The Foundation should act as the agency to handle distribution of federal orders to the workshops, and no workshop would try to beat the gun by expanding its facilities in anticipation of government orders until it was known just how much business would be available, and when.
A large advisory committee representing workshop interests was elected to work with the Foundation on the allocation question. One of its first decisions was to agree with the Foundation's executive committee that it would be more advisable for a separate corporation to be formed to carry out the provisions of the Wagner-O'Day Act than for the Foundation itself to undertake this function. In August 1938 the National Industries for the Blind, Inc. (NIB) was formed. Its founding officers were M.C. Migel, president; Robert B. Irwin, executive vice-president, Peter J. Salmon, vice-president, and William Ziegler, secretary-treasurer.
The Wagner-O'Day Act had made no provision whatever for funding either the Committee on Purchase of Blind-Made Products or the non-profit agency that would allocate orders among the workshops. The former organized itself as an interdepartmental committee of the federal government. The need to set aside seed money for the latter had been anticipated by the Foundation, whose budget for 1938 carried a line for an employee to be assigned to finding new outlets for the products of blind labor.
The Foundation had a well-qualified candidate in mind for this post: Chester C. Kleber, whose performance in managing the WPA project for the manufacture of Talking Book machines had impressed everyone. At an executive committee meeting in September 1938, C.C. Kleber was appointed vocational research agent of the Foundation at $4,000 a year. Once National Industries for the Blind got under way, the committee decided, half of Kleber's salary would be charged to the new corporation. An appropriation to give him a secretary was also voted. National Industries for the Blind was now in business.
A Pennsylvanian by birth, C.C. came to New York as a young adult and pursued a successful career in motion picture promotion until the depression cost him his job. It was then that his cousin, J.O. Kleber, introduced him to the Foundation and he was put in charge of the WPA project. A roly-poly extrovert endowed with ebullience and a promotional flair, C.C. also had the knack of working with others. There could hardly have been a more valuable quality in the man to whom was entrusted the delicate job of allocating government orders among hungrily competing workshops. As will be seen, he did an outstanding job until a fatal illness necessitated his resignation in June 1960. He died that November, just a month after being awarded the Foundation's Migel Medal for his accomplishments.
The question of how the new corporation should be financed was one of the earliest issues settled by the workshop advisory committee. A simple formula was agreed upon: a small percentage, not to exceed 5 percent, of the receipts from government orders would be charged to the participating workshops to pay for the cost of NIB's operations. The workshops would not be hurt by this arrangement, since it was expected that the fee would be regarded as an overhead expense to be taken into consideration by the Committee on Purchase of Blind-Made Products in its pricing determinations.
(In later years various other fee arrangements were developed for financing NIB, with the commission on government orders as low as 2 percent during periods of heavy volume, and with a different fee scale for NIB-generated commercial sales. At no point in the organization's history was the public ever asked for funds to support it.)
The men selected by Franklin D. Roosevelt to serve on the Committee on Purchase of Blind-Made Products came out of the top drawer of federal officialdom:
From the Treasury: Rear Admiral Christian J. Peoples, chief of the Procurement Division.
From the Navy: Rear Admiral Arthur H. Mayo of the Bureau of Supplies and Accounts.
From the War Department: Brigadier Augustus B. Warfield, the Quartermaster General.
From the Agriculture Department: Alexander M. Ashley of the Office of Budget and Finance.
From the Department of Commerce: Fletcher H. Rawls, assistant director of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce.
From the Department of the Interior: Maurice I. Tynan, then assistant to (and later successor of) J.H. Clunk in the Office of Education's Bureau for the Blind.
As the "private citizen conversant with the problems incident to the employment of the blind": M.C. Migel.
At the committee's first meeting, Admiral Peoples was elected chairman. He appointed Robert LeFevre, a member of his staff with some thirty years of experience in federal procurement, as secretary. He named Warfield, Mayo, Migel, and LeFevre to serve as the subcommittee that would decide on the blind-made products to be purchased by federal departments, determine quantities and fair market prices, and devise regulations to govern the procurement process.
In both the committee and the subcommittee, LeFevre was to admit many years later, there was "an air of skepticism … an air of doubt that blind workers could produce according to standards of quality." To guard against the possibility of failure during the crucial early stage, one of the initial regulations prohibited workshops from attempting to supply articles with which they had had no experience. The first allocations would be made only to those shops that had produced and sold similar articles during the previous six months.
Another regulation specified that at least 75 percent of the workers engaged in the production of federally purchased articles be blind. This was later revised to refer specifically to labor used in direct production, exclusive of supervision, administration and shipping. The 75 percent ratio was designed to protect bona fide workshops for blind persons from competition with quasi-commercial organizations using a handful of blind workers as window dressing. Until 1971, when the Wagner-O'Day Act was amended for the first time, it also excluded non-profit workshops which served a few blind clients but were operated primarily for persons with other types of disability.
The committee's first schedule of approved orders for brooms and mops appeared on January 1, 1939. That year, sales to federal departments came to $220,000 with 36 workshops participating. It was a slow and careful start but one in which, as LeFevre said, "the ability of blind workers to produce suitable commodities was firmly established."
Probably no piece of legislation in work for the blind was more opportunely timed than the Wagner-O'Day Act. It came into being because, under depression conditions, the nation's blind people needed the support of their government. In very short order, however, the need became reciprocal, and the nation gratefully turned to blind workers for help in the massive World War II defense buildup. By then, many of the workshops had gained experience in meeting government specifications and had broadened the variety of products they could supply. At the end of 1939 these included cocoa mats, mattresses, pillow cases, whisk brooms and several different types of mops and swabs. The expanded opportunities were reflected in the volume for 1940; in this, the second year of NIB operation, federal business aggregating more than $1 million was shared by 44 workshops.
No more prescient than anyone else, NIB's principals decided, some two years before Pearl Harbor, that defense-related orders were bound to level off soon. It would be in the best interests of blind workers, they told one another, not to rely on a continuing heavy volume of government business but to expand workshop sales to commercial outlets. With this in view, NIB announced, early in 1940, that it would seek markets for blind-made products among such quantity consumers as railroads, steamship companies, and large manufacturing concerns. An experienced salesman, D. H. Schill, was employed to carry out this national sales plan and succeeded in gaining some important industrial customers (American Can Company, National Dairies, and similar firms) as well as such chain store outlets for consumer goods as Sears Roebuck, J. C. Penney, and F. W. Woolworth. Simultaneously, NIB kept an eye open for new types of consumer goods that the workshops could manufacture. One successful new product was a line of rubber link mats developed through cooperation with the United States Rubber Company. These Nib-Link mats, made from rubber scraps and short ends, required very little equipment and relatively simple skills.
One problem that surfaced early was that many of the workshops were not capable of handling the necessary quantities. In mid-1940 an Army order for 625,000 pillow cases could only be two-thirds filled because all the workshops with sewing departments were already operating at capacity. Such frustrations had a positive side, however; they were powerful spurs for enlargement and modernization.
With government business booming, and sales to national chain stores also showing healthy growth, the General Committee on Sheltered Workshops for the Blind, into which NIB's participating shops had organized themselves, met in Chicago early in 1941 to plot directions for future expansion. The principal thrust, they agreed, should be pursuit of retail sales. House-to-house canvassing operations were already successful in Wisconsin and in Pittsburgh. To help workshops in other parts of the country embark on similar programs, NIB employed Eugene D. Morgret, the man who had developed the Pittsburgh venture. Two years later he became assistant manager of NIB and remained in its employ until retirement in 1963.
Morgret, a graduate of the Western Pennsylvania School for the Blind, had perfected sales training methods. Once he joined NIB, the first community to request his help was Wichita, Kansas, where a workshop was employing 12 blind persons three days a week. Less than three months after Morgret organized a door-to-door sales team, this same workshop had enough business to put 20 men to work five days a week and could market the products of 10 blind homeworkers.
Morgret managed to get three other workshops started on such local sales programs before Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. Until then, federal business had represented about one-fourth of the workshops' total output. This changed almost overnight as they were called upon to exert the same maximum effort as the rest of the economy. From 1941 to 1945 they delivered to their government some $32 million worth of commodities: 14 million brooms, 21 million mops, 6.5 million deck swabs, 17 million mailing bags, 41 million pillowcases, etc. There were workshops that stayed open around the clock so that three shifts could keep going. Often enough, Kleber and his staff also worked far into the night, juggling allocations, pacifying impatient purchasing officers, rushing out into the field to clear production bottlenecks, keeping tabs on delivery deadlines, scrambling for priority ratings on the raw materials needed to keep the flow of goods moving.
If National Industries for the Blind had closed its doors at the end of World War II, it would still have earned an honored place in the history of work for the blind. As leader, catalyst, and unifying force, it ushered blind workers into a new and promising era. By 1945 a congeries of 60 separate workshops was scattered through 32 states. Many of them had once been fierce competitors (in pre-NIB days many a workshop would not allow the manager of another shop to set foot on its premises), but by 1945 this assortment of diverse organizations had learned to work together, to trust one another, and to pool their resources toward common goals with a degree of mutual cooperation never before experienced in work for the blind. Not the least of their motivations was the satisfaction of serving their country. Before the end of the war a number of workshops were proudly displaying the Army-Navy "E" pennant and the Maritime "M," awards for excellence in wartime production. NIB itself was given the Navy's Certificate of Achievement for its role.
Busy as the workshops were during the hectic war years, they looked ahead. In 1943 a Postwar Planning Committee was named by the General Committee on Sheltered Workshops for the Blind. It was chaired by M. Roberta Townsend, a social worker who was then head of the department for the handicapped of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities (she later joined the staff of NIB as director of its Survey and Homework Department). After studying the results of a mail survey, the planning group came up with a series of recommendations designed to avert a disastrous drop in postwar employment of blind workers.
There was general agreement that the major problem was not production, but sales, and that the most promising avenue was retailing, both through local stores and door-to-door canvassing. The few workshops that had established sound pre-war retailing programs had managed, despite shortages of raw materials, to maintain and even increase those sales figures throughout the war years. Another well-received idea was for cooperative production and marketing arrangements, by means of which workshops could sell each other's products. Each shop could then concentrate on manufacturing only a few items and still be in a position to retail a full line of consumer goods.
There was also considerable potential in "state use" sales to local governments. Robert Irwin urged the workshops to pursue this potential:
Steps should be taken immediately to secure laws in the states similar to the federal Wagner O'Day Act. Our competitors in the commercial field are so fully occupied with war orders, they are not likely to oppose state legislation of this kind just now, so the shops should act at the earliest possible opportunity.
At this same conclave in December 1943, Irwin also called attention to a new and promising development. Public Law 113, the Barden-LaFollette amendments to the Vocational Rehabilitation Act, had been enacted a few months earlier. Under its provisions, a new flow of federal funds would be available for vocational training purposes. Workshops for the blind had long performed a training function; now, for the first time, they were in a position to expand that service without the financial loss entailed in instructing novices whose output was necessarily minimal.
This line of opportunity was carefully followed up; in mid-1945 a formal agreement was reached between National Industries for the Blind and the federal Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, stipulating that OVR recognized "acceptable workshops for the blind as a facility from which appropriate rehabilitation services may be purchased or secured on a basis comparable to that of other types of facilities." For its part, NIB agreed that it would "encourage and assist its affiliated workshops to establish training and employment facilities and opportunities comparable to those of other existing private and public facilities."
As anticipated, the end of the war put the brakes on government purchases. Nearly $1.9 million worth of workshop contracts were cancelled. Federal business during the war years had averaged $8 million annually; in 1946, the first postwar year, the figure plummeted to below $600,000. Thanks to foresighted planning, most of the workshops were prepared for the transition. They were able to maintain about the same overall level of employment and wages because the nation's hunger for civilian goods was so great that commercial sales could largely fill the void left by the drop in federal orders. Also, wartime needs had given the workshops experience in producing a much wider variety of merchandise than ever before. Sewing shops that had made pillowcases for the military now switched to diapers and aprons.
One problem the workshops had in common with the rest of American industry during the postwar reconversion period was difficulty in acquiring needed new equipment. It was at this point that, to take up the slack, some began accepting labor subcontracts—sorting and assembling of parts, packaging goods, etc.—from nearby industrial firms and from such military installations as army camps and air force supply depots. Subcontracting became, in time, one of the most widely used methods of employing blind labor, but where government installations were concerned, this phase of workshop activity met with a setback a few years later, when the Comptroller General ruled that the Wagner-O'Day Act was not applicable to anything other than tangible articles produced by the blind. The ruling meant that workshops could no longer claim preference for subcontract work from military units, although they were free to enter bids on a competitive basis. It was not until the Wagner-O'Day Act was amended in 1971 that this ruling was reversed.
Regrettably, only a few of the workshops heeded the suggestion to follow through on enactment of "little Wagner-O'Day" laws in their own states. In New York, however, agencies for the blind succeeded in getting a "state use" law passed in 1945. To implement the law, the Foundation helped organize a state allocation agency, Industries for the Blind of New York State, and loaned it sufficient capital to get under way.
One of the most productive postwar ideas, initiated by NIB in 1948, was to open up the military commissary markets to blind-made products. The household items sold to the general public were entirely suitable for post exchanges. The idea was simple in concept but difficult of execution; it was not until 1955 that the program was able to thread its way around all the bureaucratic obstacles. Once in the clear, however, it proved a steady and profitable outlet. Commissary sales in 1971, secured through competitive bids, came to $3,350,000. The figure was expected to go higher in the future, since the Wagner-O'Day Act amendments of 1971 required the "non-appropriated fund instrumentalities" of the armed services—post exchanges and military commissaries—to give blind-made products the same preferential status as did all other federal departments.
Because the various federal reorganizations that followed the war changed many of the government's purchasing procedures, NIB decided in 1950 that it needed a permanent representative in the nation's capital to make sure that the Wagner-O'Day program did not get lost in the reshuffle. Robert LeFevre, who had just retired from the federal service, was engaged while continuing to serve, in an unpaid volunteer capacity, as secretary of the Committee on Purchase of Blind-Made Products. He maintained the dual role until 1962; two years later, he was awarded the Migel Medal for his accomplishments. LeFevre made a final contribution by writing a brief history, The Story of the Wagner-O'Day Act, which NIB published in 1966. He died before the book came off the press.
The postwar period saw several other changes. One was the retirement in 1950 of M. C. Migel as the civilian member of the Committee on Purchase of Blind-Made Products. The Major was then eighty-four years old; five years earlier he had relinquished the presidency of the Foundation to become its board chairman. In 1948 he had also resigned as president of NIB and was named chairman of its board. Migel was succeeded in the presidencies of both the Foundation and the NIB by William Ziegler. (A similar pattern was followed in 1958 when Ziegler died; Jansen Noyes, Jr., took over both presidencies.)
When M. Robert Barnett succeeded Robert Irwin as the Foundation's executive director in 1949, one of his first acts was to clarify the respective areas of responsibility of the Foundation and NIB. Both organizations were getting requests for help with workshop programs. A memorandum of understanding worked out by Barnett and Kleber specified that NIB would handle all requests from existing workshops, but that it would be the Foundation's province to decide, on the basis of the total needs of a community's blind population, whether or not a workshop should be established in a territory where none existed. The agreement also regularized certain intramural relationships. NIB, which had begun with a two-person staff in a single room in the Foundation's building, had now expanded to occupy an entire floor. In 1962, when it needed even more space, the organization moved to a separate location.
Still another change during the postwar years was a two-way expansion of NIB services. Until 1950, membership was restricted to workshops qualified to produce goods that met federal specifications; now participation in NIB's commercial program was opened to shops that did not handle federal orders. The other direction of expansion was the inclusion of industrial homework programs in NIB's marketing services.
Industrial homework was differentiated from hobby pursuits through its definition as an agency service designed "to offer regular work training and remunerative work opportunity to those eligible blind persons who cannot for physical, psychological or geographic reasons leave their homes to travel to and from a place of business." By thus extending the workshop into the home, provision was finally made for the last group of blind workers: those incapable of employment in open industry, in independent business pursuits, or in workshop settings. While organizations for the blind had traditionally made efforts to market the handmade products of blind people working at home, it had been a pin-money proposition at best. The new plan aimed at giving the homebound blind worker a careful course of rehabilitation training, as similar as possible to what he would receive in a workshop, so as to provide him with "an opportunity for reasonably steady employment at a fair and regular wage."
The Fifties saw National Industries for the Blind embarked on a broad-gauged search for ever wider markets. One means toward this end was the development of the brand name "Skilcraft" for all consumer merchandise manufactured by NIB-affiliated workshops. The thought here was that the use of a uniform label on goods of uniform quality would help condition the buying public to choose blind-made products for their quality rather than out of pity.
By the time C. C. Kleber resigned in 1960, NIB was a thriving enterprise whose 62 affiliated workshops did an annual business of more than $24 million, of which $8,700,000 was federal procurement. Kleber's successor was Robert C. Goodpasture, an engineer whose background included a dozen years of business development activity with industrial firms. Goodpasture embarked on a fast-paced program to expand the sales horizons for blind-made products. By 1966 NIB's staff had grown to 70 employees and included industrial designers, engineers, purchasing and marketing specialists. The number of associated workshops was up to 73. Sales totaled more than $43.5 million, of which $19 million was to government departments. Workshop wages that year aggregated $7,700,000. The average hourly wage was $1.39. (By 1971, it had reached $1.75.)
Nineteen sixty-six saw the initiation of a new merchandising system. Display racks of Skilcraft products were installed in chain supermarkets, serviced through truck deliveries from local warehouses. This was a step into the bigtime; it was predicted that, in five years, the rack program, which began with a pilot effort in Ohio, would be expanded to 12 major market areas and produce annual sales in excess of $5 million.
Hard on the heels of this venture came two other innovations. A research and development center was opened in St. Louis to work on new products that the workshops could manufacture, and, for the first time in its history, NIB itself became the owner of a workshop. In late 1966 it bought the Mogdlin Company, a housewares manufacturing firm, with the object of converting its plant facilities into a demonstration workshop for the blind.
An original idea lay back of this purchase. No sheltered workshop had ever been started except on a tiny scale with a handful of workers. As a rule, it took years to acquire enough plant, equipment, and experienced management for a new shop to operate on more than a shoestring basis. It took at least as long to develop markets for its products. The Mogdlin-Maid venture was aimed at showing that an alternative route to growth existed through the purchase and conversion of an ongoing industrial enterprise. The idea had never been tried before.
Under the NIB plan, which was supported by a grant of $105,000 from the Social and Rehabilitation Service of HEW, the Mogdlin-Maid factory in Hazel-hurst, Mississippi, would continue in production during a gradual conversion period. All new employees would be blind workers; the sighted employees remaining at their jobs would be trained to form a team with the blind co-workers. Equipment would be retooled, readjusted and automated to fit the capabilities of blind operators. The plant would not only continue to produce the items for which it had well-established sales outlets; it would also begin to manufacture new products, along with parts that could be used by other workshops in making similar new products. Thus the financial risk of new product development would not fall solely on a single pioneering workshop but would be shared by all through National Industries for the Blind.
Another key feature of the Mississippi experiment would be as a demonstration of new and more effective ways of collaborating with a state vocational rehabilitation agency to provide evaluation, training and employment for blind and multihandicapped blind persons, particularly the latter.
All of these goals were met by 1970, when the Mogdlin-Maid (subsequently renamed Royal-Maid) operation achieved qualified status as a workshop for the blind: i.e., its 68 blind workers accounted for 75 percent of the plant's direct labor. But this was just about the only good news NIB had to impart in 1970. Like many a commercial firm, it had been badly hurt by the business recession and military cutback that began in 1969. It was financially overextended, having expanded too far and too fast in the mistaken expectation that fees from federal orders would continue to supply a firm budgetary underpinning. The decrease in defense spending instituted as part of the "winding down" of the war in Southeast Asia dropped government orders to $22,800,000 in 1970—down from a peak of $28.7 million three years earlier. More serious yet, federal business was scheduled to be even further reduced in 1971, and the rack program was in trouble. It was operating in more than 1,000 supermarkets in four states and aggregating nearly $2 million in sales, but NIB's costs in warehousing and servicing the racks created a substantial budgetary deficit.
Draconic measures were called for. Following a management survey, certain low-margin rack operations were discontinued and the remainder of the rack program was taken over by one of NIB's affiliated workshops, the Cleveland Society for the Blind. Operation of the commissary sales warehouse in Maryland was transferred to another affiliate, the New York Association for the Blind. The research and development laboratory in St. Louis was closed. Staff was reduced by some 50 percent. Robert Goodpasture resigned and was replaced by Noel B. Price, who had been his first assistant since 1965. A simultaneous reorganization took place in NIB's board of directors. Jansen Noyes, Jr., board chairman since 1963 and president for five years before that, was succeeded by Thor W. Kolle, Jr., former president; the presidency went to Abram Claude, Jr., former secretary-treasurer.
To relieve some of the financial pressure on NIB, the Foundation made it a $200,000 grant to reduce the large bank loan which had financed purchase of the Mogdlin Company. It was the first time since NIB's earliest days that the Foundation had been called upon to supply funds to the agency it had voluntarily "spun off" at birth. Additional financial help came from NIB's affiliated workshops, which loaned it an aggregate of $87,000, and from the Seeing Eye, Inc., which made a grant of $38,000 to keep NIB's rehabilitation service program going. By the end of 1971, National Industries for the Blind appeared to be stabilized on a sounder operating basis.
What happened to NIB during this troubled period constituted more than operational and financial reorganization. There was a change in direction, away from the toe-to-toe competition with profit-making industry which had been the main thrust during the Sixties and back to the basic purpose of services aimed at giving blind men and women maximum opportunity for self-support through constructive use of workshop facilities for vocational training and employment. Leadership in this turnaround was credited to Noel Price, who was presented with the Migel Medal in 1972; in appropriate tandem, his fellow awardee that year was Senator Randolph.
Beginning with World War II, a gradual change had taken place in the types of blind people employed in the workshops. Stepped-up vocational rehabilitation services had enabled the most efficient workers to take their place in open industry. Increasingly, those who remained were the multihandicapped.
NIB's Mogdlin venture had as one of its essential purposes the development of methods that could fit such multihandicapped persons into workshop production, not only by introducing needed equipment modifications but by incorporating all the necessary collateral rehabilitation services as well. Brought into play were medical, psychiatric, and psychological testing; individual and group counseling; assistance with mobility and with skills of daily living; recreational services; social work help with family relationships, housing, and other problems.
To give leadership to this renewed focus on individual needs, in 1969 NIB employed, as director of rehabilitation services, Harold Richterman, who had held a similar post at the Industrial Home for the Blind in Brooklyn. Richterman's function was not limited to Mississippi but included helping workshops all over the country upgrade their standards and strengthen their rehabilitation programs to a point where they could qualify for accreditation by the National Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the Blind and Visually Handicapped and/or certification by the General Council of Workshops.
Emphasis on standards was a keynote of the Sixties in all areas of human services. That sheltered workshops for all types of handicapped persons needed help in meeting minimum standards of quality was recognized in the 1965 amendments to the Vocational Rehabilitation Act, which provided financial support for modernization and expansion of facilities and equipment, for construction of new facilities, for innovation in training methods and techniques, and for employment of qualified staff.
Improvement of workshop operating policies and practices was long overdue. Even during the period when NIB was being hailed as a success story in the annals of American industrial progress, thoughtful critics were pointing out, with equal justice, that conditions within the workshops as places of employment left much to be desired.
There had always been philosophic differences over operating policies and practices. To the sponsoring agencies and the taxpaying or contributing public which financed the workshops, the people who worked in them were subsidized clients of a non-profit social service. Many of the people, however, thought of themselves as employees who earned by means of their labor and were therefore entitled to the same rights and benefits as all other workers: minimum wages, unemployment insurance, paid vacations and various other fringe benefits. While many of the more enlightened workshops did, in fact, provide such benefits, others were guilty of substandard work practices if not outright exploitation. Even these, it should be said, were not necessarily acting callously but out of differences in viewpoint as to what workshops were designed to accomplish. Those who believed workshops should operate as self-supporting entities, neither making a profit nor requiring subsidy, attempted to hold on to their best and most productive workers, making little or no effort to move them out into open industry. In such shops the less capable workers who could not earn their keep were left to fend for themselves; they were given little help in improving their skills or output and were the first to be laid off during slack periods.
Most workshops for the blind compensated their workers on a piecework basis comparable to competitive industry, but some undercut prevailing wage rates, particularly when vying for industrial subcontracts. Some were paying low trainee wages to persons employed under a vocational rehabilitation plan and kept such persons in trainee status for unduly long periods. The charge was frequently made that state vocational counselors collaborated in this process by "dumping" clients who represented difficult rehabilitation problems into the workshops and leaving them there indefinitely.
If a few workshops for the blind were indeed guilty of these practices, the situation in sheltered workshops for other groups of handicapped people was often infinitely worse. This was the principal reason why, when the National Federation of the Blind initiated legislation in 1960 seeking an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act that would introduce a mandatory minimum wage scale in workshops for the blind, the Foundation and the AAWB opposed the bill. Although fully sympathetic to the intent of the legislation (which subsequently died in committee), these two national bodies held that it was discriminatory to focus such a bill on workshops for the blind, which were paying demonstrably higher wages than the sheltered shops for people with other disabilities. Four years later, when a similar measure—again sponsored by the National Federation of the Blind—was introduced that would apply to sheltered workshops for all types of handicapped people, it received the firm support of the Foundation and the AAWB.
Passed in 1966 over vigorous opposition from most organizations in the sheltered workshop field, the Fair Labor Standards Act amendments established, for the first time in history, a statutory minimum (50 percent of the going minimum wage) for people employed in all sheltered workshops. While exempting certain classes of workshop clients from this wage standard, it introduced safeguards to require annual certification by a state vocational rehabilitation agency that the exempted persons were either in a work evaluation or training status, or were so handicapped that their earning capacity was severely impaired, or were employed in a new category of facility, called a work activities center. A work activities center was not really a workshop but a therapeutic program for persons with little productive capacity.
While the organizations for and of the blind succeeded in overcoming the pressures of other interests in the sheltered workshop field with respect to minimum wages, they met with failure when it came to unemployment insurance. The Employment Security Act amendments of 1970, which mandated such benefits for all regular employees of non-profit organizations nationwide, specifically exempted clients of sheltered workshops from coverage.
The argument that prevailed with Congress in this instance was as much sheer weight of numbers as anything else. Sheltered workshops for all types of physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially handicapped persons grew tremendously during the Fifties and Sixties; in 1970, the number of such workshops exceeded 1,500, with an aggregate of 100,000 clients. In comparison, the blind workshop field was tiny: approximately a hundred shops employing 5,000 people. Insistence that non-profit organizations would be subjected to ruinous financial burdens if they had to carry the cost of unemployment insurance coverage for 100,000 people induced Congress to classify handicapped people employed in the workshops as recipients of vocational rehabilitation rather than as workers entitled to the same protection as other labor groups.
Over the years, repeated but unsuccessful efforts were also made by organizations of blind people to gain collective bargaining rights in the workshops. Even without the right of unionization, strikes occurred now and then. A report on the public reaction to a sit-down strike in Pittsburgh in 1937 observed that the press was "more impressed with the oddity than the gravity of the situation." In 1961, however, a strike in the St. Louis Lighthouse for the Blind over the issue of union recognition was treated more seriously. It went before the National Labor Relations Board which, in a split decision, refused jurisdiction. The two-month stoppage was finally settled by an arbitrated agreement in which union recognition was ruled out but two local labor leaders were added to the Lighthouse board of directors.
There was one other philosophic disagreement over workshop employment of blind men and women that arose from time to time. As has been noted, the overall sheltered workshop movement expanded greatly after World War II. While many of the newer shops served only people with a specific handicap (cerebral palsy, mental illness or retardation, alcoholism, cardiac weakness, etc.), others were set up as community workshops that served people with a variety of disabilities.
In work for the blind, the traditional position was that blind men and women were best off in their own shops, where conditions and equipment could be adapted to their particular needs. It was further argued that blind workers tended to be "lost" in the community workshops, where they were sure to be greatly out-numbered by people with other disabilities, and where those in charge lacked experience in how to deal with the emotional, psychological, and practical problems of blindness. Whatever the merits of these arguments, they seemed to contravene the more modern philosophy that blind people could best gain public acceptance through integration with the sighted in all phases of life.
This moot point was one of several issues raised during the Congressional hearings in 1970 and 1971 that preceded passage, in July 1971, of a sweeping set of amendments to the Wagner-O'Day Act. The major changes effected by Public Law 92-28 were these:
Blind workers lost the exclusive preferential position they had held for 33 years in relation to federal procurement. The Wagner-O'Day umbrella was extended to all sheltered workshops for the handicapped. As a concession to the status quo ante, workshops for the blind were given priority (after the prison industries, which retained their traditional first-preferred status) on the manufacture of products for federal use; orders that the workshops for the blind were not in a position to handle would then go, as a second priority, to workshops serving persons with other disabilities.
The provision of services as well as products was written into the law for the first time. Workshops for the blind were given a five-year priority on service contracts for federal agencies on the same "fair price" basis as the sale of products.
Commissaries, post exchanges, and similar "non-appropriated fund" operations of the armed services were required to abide by the same Wagner-O'Day rules as all other government agencies. Workshop sales to these outlets, previously handled through competitive bids, were brought under the "fair price" provisions.
For the first time, a budget was provided to staff the federal committee, whose membership was doubled to 14 and whose title was similarly enlarged to become the Committee for Purchase of Products and Services of the Blind and Other Severely Handicapped.
This bill to extend the provisions of the Wagner-O'Day Act to workshops serving other handicapped persons was introduced in April 1970 by Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York, with Senators Jennings Randolph of West Virginia and Warren Magnuson of Washington as co-sponsors. A companion measure was introduced in the House by a group of Congressmen led by Representative Craig Hosmer of California. The legislation was initiated by the International Association of Rehabilitation Facilities with the support of the National Association of Sheltered Workshops, the Federation of the Handicapped, Goodwill Industries of America, the National Association for Retarded Children, and the National Rehabilitation Association.
From the field of blindness, endorsement came from AAWB, the Foundation, NIB and the Blinded Veterans Association, all of which took the position that it would be poor public policy to refuse to share the Wagner-O'Day Act privileges with persons handicapped by disabilities other than blindness, so long as adequate safeguards protected the needs and rights of blind persons. Testimony in opposition to the bill came from the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council for the Blind, mainly on the grounds that administrative changes under the amended Act might operate to the detriment of blind workers.
Some witnesses at the Congressional hearings preceding the bill's passage described the expanded program's potential in euphoric terms, with predictions that the four-hundred-plus items on the 1971 federal Schedule of Blind-Made Products would soon grow to 75,000 items involving astronomical sums. The experience after one year gave greater credence to the assertions of other witnesses, who said the workshops newly admitted to the Act's provisions would first have to experience the same "learning curve" that began for workshops for the blind in 1938. Still, the newcomers were expected to have an easier time of it; here, as elsewhere, blind men and women had blazed a trail for others to follow.
