Goodwill is paying some of its disabled workers just 22 cents an hour, while the charity’s executives make six figure salaries. A labor law loophole enables the practice.

Some Pennsylvania Goodwill workers who are disabled made as little as 22, 38 and 41 cents per hour in 2011, according to Labor Department documents reviewed by NBC News. That’s because a 1938 law, called the Special Wage Certificate Program, aimed at encouraging employers to hire disabled workers, allows charities and companies to get special certificates from the Department of Labor that permits them to pay disabled workers based on their abilities, with no minimum.

Though other employers take advantage of the same loophole, recent media investigations have brought attention to Goodwill’s use of the certificate.

As some workers were making as little as 22 cents per hour in 2011, Goodwill International CEO Jim Gibbons made $729,000 in salary and deferred compensation. The CEOs of Goodwill franchises across the country collectively earned about $30 million, according to NBC.

Brad Turner-Little, Goodwill’s director of mission strategy, told The Huffington Post that compensation of Goodwill executives and the wages earned by workers with disabilities aren’t “connected.” He explained that local Goodwill organizations make independent determinations about what to pay their executives based on what they need to recruit “good talent.”

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