Home Health Workers Are Sick of Being Shut Out of Labor Law

[marmar]

from In These Times:



Home Health Workers Are Sick of Being Shut Out of Labor Law

Friday
Jul 29, 2011
12:27 pm

By Michelle Chen


As walking canes replace running shoes, and the parents who raised us start needing to be cared for themselves, the first dawn of America's aging boom approaches. But even as the "gray wave" looms on the horizon, the way we treat the workers who care for our elders lags generations behind.

Hundreds of thousands of home care workers remain excluded from the country's key labor laws. As with many other groups of “excluded workers," like farm and day laborers, inequities in the law hit immigrants and people of color the hardest. And the stakes are higher in home care industry, in which demand for, and the cost of care, reach unprecedented levels. More people have been moving toward home- and community-based services for the elderly and people with disabilities, as alternative to institutionalization. Evidence indicates caring for people at home is in many cases more cost-effective than conventional nursing homes.

Yet for all the help they provide, home care workers feel a bit neglected these days. Through an arcane provision in federal labor law, Washington has essentially shut home-based health workers from minimum-wage and overtime rules. That means home health aides may be even worse off than regular domestic workers, who are at least technically entitled to federal minimum wage. The Department of Labor has since the 1970s manipulated an exemption for “companion” workers “into a wholesale exclusion” of some 1.7 million skilled workers, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project:

The result has been to suppress wages for the home care workforce, consigning millions of caregivers—the overwhelming majority of them women, many of them immigrants and women of color—to working poverty. The lack of ordinary overtime coverage has also facilitated excessive hours in small segments of the industry. Long hours are not only grueling for workers but can contribute to worse care for patients, as caregivers working 60 hours or more a week face fatigue and stress in performing what is a demanding job under any circumstances. These substandard working conditions have created very serious employee recruitment and retention problems, generating labor shortages that prevent us from meeting the nation’s rapidly growing need for home care.

NELP has called on the Department of Labor to revise its regulations to include home care workers under federal wage-and-hour protections. Absent federal protection, only 21 states and the District of Columbia currently provide minimum wage or overtime. Still, the NELP points to those local examples as proof that federal coverage of home care workers is feasible. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11763/health_workers_at_home_are_sick_of_being_shut_out_of_labor_law/

[Deep13]

1. I should think so! nt

[midnight]

2. The arcane thinking that targets workers rights in this area is

also hitting health care workers in hospitals... It was highlighted a few years ago by nurses working for Aurora via discussions with management and the head of the hospital told them if they want more money they should marry someone rich... So many nurses dressed up in wedding gowns and proposed to this overpaid administrator. The working infrastructure in this country has been under attach via hundreds of model legislative bills that our local and national legislators, now turned lobbyist for ALEC, pass every year. Our current Governor in Wisconsin is an ALEC member since his walked through the door of politics... His ability to win an elected seat came via two special elections.... Something that will now hopefully come to Wisconsin voters via his own recall. Oddly enough this ALEC lobbyist was in such a hurry to serve he didn't have time to get a college degree.