Julie Vogtman, Senior Counsel

Ah, August. Congress is out, traffic is a (relative) breeze, and I’m feeling refreshed after a relaxing family vacation that involved lots of lazy beach time and zero talk of what was happening back at the office.

…Well, maybe not zero. One thing I’ve found about devoting your career to really interesting women’s issues is that it’s not unusual for conversations with friends and family to wind up delving into those very same issues. Especially if, say, I’m in a house with 20 or so family members from across the country who want to know more about what’s going on in Washington.  

My family is full of bright, interesting people who are pretty on top of current events and have a range of perspectives on the issues. Previous gatherings have involved talk of taxes, health care policy, climate change, and the need to reform agricultural practices. This year, the subject of welfare came up – and so did some misinformation about a recent proposal from the Obama administration to allow states to waive certain work participation requirements under the federal welfare program (known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF).

In case you (like many of us here at NWLC) have been too busy dealing with power outages and oppressive heat to keep up with the New York Times over the past few days, I wanted to flag for you a great op-ed from Sunday’s paper. In it, Professors Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein make a concise and compelling case for granting long overdue Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) protections – minimum wage and overtime premium pay – to home care workers.

You might recall that President Obama has also called for this policy change, and late last year, the Department of Labor (DOL) proposed a new rule that would extend FLSA protections to home care workers. Specifically, the proposed regulations would exclude these workers from the FLSA’s exemption for “companionship services.” To date, this exemption – which was intended to exempt casual caregivers, like babysitters, from FLSA requirements when the statute was expanded to cover domestic service workers in 1974 – has been inappropriately applied to the professional workers who provide the intensive care necessary for many elderly and ill adults to remain in their homes. As Boris and Klein observe, the home care workforce has exploded since the 1970s as the U.S. population has aged, and the “existing exemption mainly serves home-care franchises, an $84 billion industry that is one of the most profitable in the United States….[It] has allowed staffing agencies to avoid paying overtime [and] treated women who labored to support their families as if they were teenagers picking up some spending money.”