It Took Over 75 Years for Home Care Workers to Win Basic Rights. A New Rule Would Strip Them Away.

A critical challenge facing home care in the United States dates back to 1938, when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. The law granted minimum wage and overtime protections to most American workers, but deliberately excluded domestic workers—predominantly Black women. It was a choice grounded in both racism and sexism, and home care workers lived with the consequences for 75 years. Now, that threaten the availability of home care in every state, the Administration and its federal Department of Labor seek to bring that exclusion back.

More than assist older adults and individuals with disabilities with daily personal care and help them maintain their health, safety, and social engagement. By fulfilling the rising need for services, home care workers in turn enable family caregivers to stay in the labor force and sustain their own careers and overall wellbeing.

While Congress extended labor protections to most domestic workers in 1974, it took until 2015 for home care workers to finally gain the same basic labor protections that most American workers take for granted. Since then, the home care workforce has more than doubled, outpacing growth in every other occupation in the country. Home care industry revenue rose more than 50 percent, from $68.3 to $102.7 billion. The dire predictions that wage protections would devastate this industry never came true. Home care providers adapted, albeit with challenges for Medicaid-funded providers operating on narrow margins set by inadequate reimbursement.

Yet the Department of Labor now proposes to strip home care workers of the right to minimum wage and overtime pay, devaluing their labor and demeaning their skilled contributions to families, communities, and the economy.

There is a bitter irony here. The Department of Labor exists to protect workers by setting employment standards, enforcing rights, and ensuring fair treatment on the job. This rule would turn that mission on its head, using the agency’s authority not to safeguard workers but to strip away protections they have held for a decade. What’s more, by repealing these hard-won protections, the Department of Labor risks returning to the racist and sexist roots of home care workers’ original exclusion from the Fair Labor Standards Act.

We must be honest about that history,

The Department of Labor argues its proposed rule will expand access to care by reducing costs and attracting more workers, disingenuously suggesting that the ratio of home care workers to individuals receiving services has declined in the past decade due to the extension of the Fair Labor Standards Act to this workforce. The reality is that, in a sector plagued by poor job quality and resulting recruitment and retention challenges, demand for care is rising faster than the labor market can match. This challenge will only intensify as the U.S. population over 65 approaches 89 million by 2060.

The solution to the growing care gap is to improve jobs, not eliminate worker protections.

Currently, the median pay for home care jobs is $16.77 an hour—less than most retail and fast-food jobs—and annual earnings hover around $22,500. Two in five home care workers live near or below the federal poverty line, and more than half rely on public assistance. Driven by poor job quality, home care workforce turnover is approximately 75 percent. Ensuring basic employment protections is fundamental—and only a starting point for strengthening and stabilizing this workforce to meet rising demand.

Instead, home care workers are currently experiencing a convergence of damaging policies. The Department of Labor’s proposal to repeal home care workers’ employment rights has arrived alongside $900 billion in Medicaid cuts that will gut long-term care funding, immigration restrictions that are driving paid caregivers—29 percent of whom are immigrants—out of the workforce, and the rescission of federal nursing home staffing standards that researchers estimated would have saved13,000 lives per year. Together, these policies are destabilizing America’s care infrastructure, even as demand grows.

There is a different path forward. Congress can and should take action to strengthen the direct care workforce in sustainable, forward-thinking ways. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) have introduced the Fair Wages for Home Care Workers Act—bicameral legislation that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to codify in statute the minimum wage and overtime protections home care        workers have held since 2015. This approach recognizes what should be obvious: quality care requires quality jobs. At the state level, Oregon for home care workers into state law, Virginia’s legislature enacted state overtime protections for agency-employed home care workers and all domestic workers through two state bills, and Washington, D.C. legislators are working to advance comparable measures.

Growing demand for care is not a problem to be solved by deregulation; it is a reality that requires investment, planning, and respect for the workers who will meet it. This is not a debate about labor regulations. It is a debate about what we owe the people who need support and the people who provide it. Right now, we are failing both.