In a long dreaded move, the U.S. Department of Labor has issued a final rule requiring that time-and-a-half overtime be paid to at-home attendants who put in more than 40 hours a week caring for a disabled or elderly person. “Many home health aides provide live-in services, and overnight and weekend hours could result in their receiving substantial amounts of overtime pay,” notes Steve Miller at the Society for Human Resource Management. Families employing such attendants will also be required to keep records of time worked. There are a few narrow, hard-to-use exceptions. The rule also brings attendants under minimum wage laws, but it’s the overtime provision that has raised the most fear.
This is a terrible rule. The fear and anger it has stirred is coming not just from commercial employment agencies, as some careless media accounts might leave you to think, but above all from elderly and disabled persons and their families and loved ones, who know that home attendant services are often the only alternative to institutional or nursing home care.
Even if you’ve followed this issue you probably had no idea that in April, ADAPT, a well-known disability-rights group, staged a demonstration in Washington, D.C. to protest the proposed overtime rule and even blocked all the entrances to the Department of Labor to make its point. That was hardly reported at all in the media; I learned about it through Prof. Samuel Bagenstos’s blog on disability rights law.