Juneteenth and Our Nation’s Unfinished Work of Valuing Care and Care Workers
This Juneteenth marks 161 years since the last enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed. The day has always carried a dual meaning: a celebration of liberation, and an accounting of how long this country made freedom wait. For PHI, it is also a day to reflect on how that history lives on in the direct care workforce.
Nearly one in three direct care workers in this country is Black—home care workers, nursing assistants, and residential care aides who support millions of older adults and people with disabilities every day. That representation is not incidental. After emancipation, domestic and care work was among the few occupations open to Black women, and that labor was systematically devalued from the start. When Congress established the nation’s foundational labor protections in the 1930s, domestic workers (a workforce composed largely of Black women) were deliberately excluded from minimum wage, overtime, and collective bargaining rights. As PHI President and CEO Jodi M. Sturgeon recently wrote, it took over 75 years for home care workers to win basic rights—protections they finally secured in 2015. Based on the federal Administration’s actions, those protections face significant risk of being lost again today.
The consequences of that history are measurable in the present. Direct care workers continue to earn near-poverty wages despite doing work that the entire long-term care system depends on, and women of color in this workforce face compounded disparities in pay, advancement, and economic security. These outcomes reflect decisions about which work is valued, which workers are protected, and how care is financed that were made over generations. Those decisions can be remade.
This year, the stakes are especially clear. A federal proposal to roll back wage and overtime protections for home care workers would return this workforce to a legal status rooted in the exclusions of the 1930s, and a separate proposed rule would make it easier to misclassify home care workers as independent contractors, stripping away employee benefits and protections in a sector where women and people of color are overrepresented. The repeal of federal nursing home staffing standards threatens both workers and the residents they support, while pressures on Medicaid, the primary payer for long-term services and supports, threaten the funding that determines whether direct care jobs can offer family-sustaining wages at all. The throughline from 1865 to 2026 runs straight through these debates: the question of whether this country fully values care remains a live policy question, answered every year in statute, regulation, and budget.
Juneteenth asks us to hold both celebration and accountability. PHI celebrates the skill, expertise, and leadership of Black direct care workers. And we dedicate our work to what that sense of accountability demands: producing research documenting disparities in this workforce, advancing policies that raise compensation and strengthen protections, and elevating the voices of direct care workers in shaping the future of this sector.
The promise of Juneteenth has never been fully realized for the workers at the heart of our nation’s care systems. Honoring the day means building a long-term care system where the people who provide care are compensated, protected, and recognized in full measure of their worth.
