The Factory Life

On weekday mornings at a quarter after 8, a white handicapped-accessible van trundles down Vine Street, an industrial row in Harrisonville. It rolls past the RB Industries saw-blade manufacturing plant and ChemSyn Laboratories, where technicians mix toxic anticancer drugs. The van pulls to a stop in front of a squat ocher building and a blue plastic sign: Casco Area Workshop Inc. About fifteen workers -- all of them mentally retarded -- climb out of the van and shuffle into the building.

Parents pull up in front of the workshop to drop off their disabled sons and daughters before speeding away to their busy lives. During the next few minutes, more than 150 workers file into the break room to peel off their bulky coats. In the room where they congregate, yelling and hugging and slapping hands, the sour odor of a school cafeteria -- a mix of bleach, hot dogs and soggy carpet -- permeates the air.

Among the workers is Kenneth Skelton.

He begins his day by walking down a long hallway to a large cement-floored space with high ceilings, long assembly tables and a few machines. There he does the same simple task for six hours at a time. He calls it the Spot Shot job.

"You take a band," he says loudly, "and put it on the cans."

Every ten seconds or so, he pulls one paper band out of a box and slips it over two blue-and-orange spray cans of Spot Shot carpet-stain remover. Another worker then passes the pair of cans through a shrink-wrap machine and places them in a shallow cardboard box, to be made into displays for Wal-Mart. Kenneth Skelton has been working on the Spot Shot job for "a long time." He's not sure how long.

Commotion prevails as soon as Peggy Kutchback, who runs the place, walks through. People stop working and stare or bellow out greetings. Indomitably cheery for someone just back from a Hawaiian vacation, Kutchback gives out hugs and affectionate thumps on the back to those who mob her.

The chaos doesn't bother her. Cocking her head at the sound of loud moans coming from down the hall, Kutchback says, "Oh, that's just Johnny. He's getting upset again." Then a woman's wailing sends Kutchback hustling over to Amy, whose face is buried in her hands. Kutchback picks up the phone and calls a social worker to come calm the woman down. Amy is schizophrenic and hallucinates a lot. She'll scream and cry, making her mascara run, but no one knows what she sees. Other workers stop and look at her and fidget awkwardly until help arrives.

Casco Area Workshop is one of 91 "sheltered workshops" in Missouri, which employ more than 8,000 people who live with what doctors call "developmental disabilities." Most of the workers have mild to severe mental retardation. Some, like Amy, also have a mental illness. Other workers have autism, cerebral palsy or epilepsy and other health problems exacerbated by their physical disabilities.

By Missouri law, the workshops can pay these employees less than minimum wage but must pay them at least 52 cents an hour. Workers get paid for each piece they finish, and individual workshop directors set the per-piece rate based on the same type of time and motion studies used by such large businesses as Ford Motor Company. Each year in May, Kutchback surveys wages at local companies where workers do similar tasks. By dividing a nondisabled worker's salary by the number of units he or she can complete in an hour, Kutchback and other workshop operators determine the per-piece rate for their disabled employees. A simple assembler in Cass County makes about $6.45 an hour, but many of the workers at Casco earn $1 an hour.

Kenneth Skelton is 45 years old and makes between $50 and $60 on each biweekly paycheck. It will take two weeks of banal and repetitive work to buy that nice Thermos he's been wanting, or three CDs, or a few dinners out.

Six years ago, as Skelton neared his 40th birthday, his world barely extended past the inside of his parents' house on the edge of Peculiar. And his parents were getting old.

Ever since the 1950s, when the Skeltons discovered that their infant son had cerebral palsy and when disabilities often were seen as shameful, Asa and Geraldine Skelton had tenderly and protectively taken care of Kenneth's every need. As Kenneth got older, his muscles atrophied so much that it simply was easier for him to use a wheelchair to get around. His parents would go into the bathroom with him, hoist him onto the toilet, then clean him up.

When Kenneth was a teenager, sheltered workshops were just getting started -- they were usually organized by parents. His mother used to take him to a borrowed building in Kansas City where, with other disabled children, Kenneth would cut material, weigh seeds or perform whatever other tasks could be invented to keep them busy. Then his parents moved to the house on five acres in Peculiar, where they kept a few dairy cows. Asa Skelton became involved with the board of the Casco Area Workshop, but Kenneth did not work there. As Kenneth got older, he became weaker and more homebound.