Home Health Care Workers Need Overtime and Minimum Wage Protections, Witnesses Tell House Subcommittee

Thursday, October 25, 2007

WASHINGTON, DC -- At a hearing of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections of the House Education and Labor Committee today, witnesses urged the committee to pass legislation to close a loophole that prevents home health care workers from receiving basic minimum wage and overtime pay protections.

“There is a shortage of home health care workers. Turnover is very high, and nearly one-half of the home health care workers leave their jobs each year,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), chair of the subcommittee. “This in turn impacts on the quality of care people receive and in many cases disrupts their care to the point where they are unable to stay at home. The culprit is low pay.”

Woolsey introduced the Fair Home Health Care Act (H.R. 3582) in response to a June 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision which held that a 1975 U.S. Labor Department regulation renders home health care workers ineligible for overtime and minimum wage protections. The plaintiff in the case, Evelyn Coke, a retired home health care worker, sued her employer because she regularly worked overtime during her 20-year career and rarely received overtime pay.

“Placing homecare workers outside the mainstream of workers covered by our nation’s most fundamental employment standards is not only unsound labor and employment policy, but also unsound long-term care policy as we face a growing shortage of workers willing and able to perform these essential services,” said Craig Becker, attorney for Ms. Coke and associate general counsel of the Service Employees International Union.

Becker also said the demand for health aides is projected to increase by 56 percent over the next decade.

Home healthcare workers earned an average of $9.95 per hour in 2006, compared with a U.S. average of $19.29 for the rest of the workforce that year. And more than 20 percent of home health care workers earn annual incomes below the federal poverty level. They are twice as likely as other workers to receive food stamps and to lack health insurance.  

“Even though I regularly work more than 40 hours a week, I do not get overtime pay,” said Manuela Butler, a home health care worker from Brooklyn, who has provided in-home services to an elderly woman for the past decade. “I would get time and half pay for my overtime hours for performing the same tasks if she were in a nursing home facility. But because my work helps her to stay in her home, I am deprived of overtime pay. That’s just wrong and unfair.”

Witnesses also noted that while many home health care workers are ineligible for basic wage protections, aides who perform similar tasks in nursing homes and other domestic workers are subject to minimum wage and overtime pay.

“Strikingly, the same work performed by an aide in a nursing home is unambiguously covered by minimum wage and hour protection,” said Dorie Seavey, director of policy research at the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute. “By supporting this kind of disparity, the exemption impedes the normal functioning of markets, and serves to undermine the development of a stable, adequate workforce of paid caregivers to provide home- and community-based services.”

Henry Claypool, policy director of Independence Care System, agreed that wage protections should apply equally to health care aides across the industry. Independence Care System is a New York City nonprofit that provides services the disabled living in their home.

“For the disability community, the number one civil rights issue in this country is the need to expand access to community long-term services so that Medicaid beneficiaries who need these services are not forced to be isolated in a nursing home in order to receive these services,” said Claypool. “When community-based direct-care workers are exempted from wage and hour protections, it exacerbates the institutional bias by making direct-care jobs in nursing homes more attractive than comparable jobs in community settings.”

For more about the Fair Home Health Care Act, click here.

 
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