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PHI Midterm Policy Brief Series: Defend Labor Rights

Brief
July 1, 2026
PHI Midterm Policy Brief Series: Defend Labor Rights

Direct care workers are losing the basic workplace protections that millions of other American workers take for granted. This brief, the third in PHI’s three-part midterm policy series, examines how federal actions—including a proposed rollback of minimum wage and overtime protections for home care workers, weakened worker-classification standards, and the repeal of nursing home staffing standards—are deepening long-standing job quality challenges for this largely female, disproportionately immigrant and BIPOC workforce.

Defend Labor Rights assesses the erosion of labor protections and oversight infrastructure and its consequences for workforce stability and care quality, and sets out concrete recommendations for policymakers, from restoring wage and overtime protections to reinstating nursing home staffing standards and investing in a national direct care workforce strategy.

Click here to read the first brief in this series, Restore Medicaid, which examines how Medicaid cuts are destabilizing the direct care workforce.

Click here to read the second brief in this series, Support Immigrants, which examines how federal immigration policy is destabilizing the direct care workforce.

Key Takeaways

The Department of Labor has proposed removing home care workers from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which would strip minimum wage and overtime protections from workers who only won those rights in 2015—while also making it easier to misclassify them as independent contractors, costing workers an estimated $7,719 to $10,963 per year in lost wages and benefits.
CMS finalized historic minimum staffing standards in 2024—standards expected to save approximately 13,000 lives per year—only to repeal them the following year, removing a critical protection for both nursing home workers and residents.
Deep staffing cuts at the Department of Labor (14% in 2025 alone) and HHS (nearly 20%) have weakened the agencies responsible for enforcing wage laws, collecting workforce data, and supporting long-term care systems—making it harder to uphold the standards that remain.
 
Contributing Authors
PHI

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