Workers, Union Leaders Welcome Extending Minimum Wage, Overtime Pay To Home Health Care Workers

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)

Laura Lyn Clark toils more than 100 hours a week, and she gets paid $8.87 per hour – and that’s for the first 40 of them. She doesn’t get overtime pay. Her health insurance may come from Medicaid.  She hasn’t had a vacation.  She doesn’t know if she’ll be able to send her daughter to college.  And retirement?  Forget it.  She hasn’t been able to sock money away. Now, she will.  Clark is a home health care worker in Virginia.  But she’s also one of the more than two million such workers who will, under final rules the Obama administration’s Labor Department unveiled last week, get paid at least the minimum wage – and overtime. The rules, from DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, cover home health care aides, personal care aides and certified nursing assistants.  “We do work hard for very little.  You can’t go far on $8.87 an hour,” Clark told a telephone press conference on the rules. Clark loves her work caring for the elderly.  “Everything you do for yourself and take for granted, I do for her,” Clark says of her employer.  But the rules, she said, “will allow workers like me to get what they need.” Unions, workers’ rights groups and women’s rights groups lobbied hard for the new rules, which Democratic President Barack Obama first proposed in Dec. 2011.  Some 90% of the home health care workers are female and half are minorities.  Thus union leaders cheered the unveiling of the Obama Labor Department’s final rules. “This rule corrects long-standing injustice,” said AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Laura Reyes, herself a former home care worker. - Mark Gruenberg, Press Associates; photo: then-Sen. Barack Obama spent a day on the job with SEIU home care worker Pauline Beck in 2007.