“Our goal really is to stop the 24-hour shifts. It should have stopped six years ago when these women first spoke out — working through the night and literally breaking their bodies.”
Domestic work and care work have historically been underpaid and overlooked, and the fact that even today this labor is often referred to as “help” rather than conceived as professional labor betrays the long devaluation of women’s work. T
The rule is "a blatant political attack on a group of workers that are 90% women and majority people of color,” said April Verrett, president of SEIU Local 2015, which represents some 380,000 California home care and nursing home workers.
This paper focuses on an important subset of workers who provide homecare and early care and education services to the very young, people with disabilities, and those who are frail due to age or illness. We explain the need to raise these workers’ wages and the unique structure of their industries.
Unless California’s homecare crisis is addressed and workers’ wages are increased, the elderly and people with disabilities will not get the care they require, homecare workers will continue to live in poverty, and the public cost of long-term care will increase.
A decision in favour of Pamela Harris in the Harris v. Quinn case before the U.S. Supreme Court would seriously impact the quality of care provided to tens of thousands of seniors and people with disabilities who use state-supported home care services.
It would do this by ruling the collective agreement covering more than 27,000 workers unconstitutional. More broadly, a ruling that the current system is unconstitutional threatens the future of collective bargaining.
Since they were exempted from the FLSA nearly four decades ago, home care workers seldom have been paid overtime and their net income is often less than the minimum wage, considering time spent in travel between the homes where they work in a single day and its cost. Unlike workers covered by federal labor laws, they have not been paid for all the hours they are on the clock.
Tuesday marked the 75th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which ended some of the worst abuses of American workers by establishing the 40-hour work week, restricting child labor, setting a minimum wage and requiring overtime pay for hours worked beyond 40 in a given week. When will home care workers receive these most basic labor protections?
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