Department of Labor

Because of a new rule out today from the Department of Labor, home care workers will no longer be left out of the basic wage and hour protections guaranteed by the FLSA. Today’s rule extends wage and hour protections to all direct care workers employed by home care agencies and other third parties. This is excellent news, and it’s about time!

The exclusion of home care workers from the FLSA is emblematic of all that is wrong with the way our society values (or doesn’t value) women’s work. This 90% female workforce does vitally important work for their clients, such as bathing, clothing, and administering medication. Yet, this work – like work in many female-dominated jobs – is among the most poorest paid. Home care workers typically earn below $10 an hour.

In 1975, only one year after Congress extended the FLSA’s protections to domestic workers employed by individual households, the Department of Labor took these protections away from home care workers through an expansive reading of the “companionship” exemption. This interpretation was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007, and home care workers and their advocates have been clamoring for the rule released today ever since. Read more »

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.” Read more »

Join the National Women’s Law Center and tell the Department of Labor that you agree that home care workers deserve the basic protections of the minimum wage and overtime laws.

The vast majority of home care workers—over 90 percent—are women, disproportionately women of color. They provide a lifeline for the elderly and people with disabilities. Their jobs are emotionally and physically demanding, whether they are helping a client to bathe and dress, encouraging a client to take appropriate food, medicine, and exercise, or assisting a client who may use a walker, wheelchair, or portable oxygen equipment to get to the grocery store or a doctor’s appointment. They allow frail elders and people with disabilities to stay in their homes for as long as possible by giving them the help that they need and provide families peace of mind in knowing that their loved ones are being cared for. Many home care workers are the primary breadwinners for their families and struggle to survive on median annual wages of less than $21,000 for full-time work – less than the Federal Poverty Guideline for a family of four. Read more »

It’s the first Friday of a new year – which means the first blog roundup of 2012 is here! There’s some good news and bad news to start the year off– but isn’t that how it always seems to be – including stories on the FBI’s definition of rape, advances for nursing mothers, the attack on a clinic in Florida, a fresh new model gracing the pages of Target and Nordstrom ads, and more on the recent Plan B decision. Read more »

I’m a native Seattleite. Here in the other Washington, I’m constantly asked about two things: rain, and coffee. (Note: I’d rather talk about the departed Sonics, and/or how awesome ferries are. But I digress.) “Are there really coffee shops on every corner?” Yes. “Does it really rain almost every day?” Why do you think we drink so much coffee?

But if the chilly damp of the Northwest explains the local obsession with coffee, it does nothing to illuminate the coffee industry’s newest fad in the region: bikini-clad baristas.

That’s right. The classic drive-through espresso stand has been transformed into an adult-only (in most counties) food service station. Obviously, management is not concerned about clothing their employees in weather-appropriate attire.  Yet, in at least one chain of stands, management hasn’t been concerned with paying them correctly either. Read more »

Yesterday we submitted comments to the Department of Labor regarding its proposal for a new compensation data collection tool. You can read our comments here.

This tool would allow the Department of Labor to collect compensation data from federal contractors in order to identify pay disparities and potential discrimination. One-fourth of our labor force works for federal contractors. But it’s increasingly difficult for workers to identify pay discrimination and enforce their rights under antidiscrimination laws. Over 61% of employers prohibit or strongly discourage employees from sharing wage information, leaving workers unaware of significant pay disparities. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has drastically increased the obstacles that workers must surmount to enforce their statutory rights. Last, loopholes in equal pay laws and the failure of the Paycheck Fairness Act to pass the Senate make it easier for many employers to avoid antidiscrimination obligations.     Read more »