U.S. to Include Home Care Aides in Wage and Overtime Law
It is crazy. What is next? 1099s? Tax withholdings?
Hiring a local person (not through an agency) to sit with an elderly person part time was one of the least expensive ways to deal with an elderly person needing assisted living. Now if they spend the night, so they work more than 40 hours in a week, they have to be paid overtime.
I don’t know a single person who hires a person to ‘clean house’ that pays ANYTHING but CASH.
They won’t report any of these persons, because they need the help for the harder chores & they won’t tip over the apple cart for all involved.
Over the past couple of years with a back injury, I have hired pick-up people from my community to help me clean house, to paint, move heavy objects and to do gardening and mowing. I paid them $10 an hour. If the government starts interfering with micro-commerce like this, old people will be driven out of their homes for lack of maintaining them.
Mr Sowell If your intent is to help workers, how about advocating bringing the exported jobs back and getting the load of government. We have minimum wage jobs up the wazoo.
Where do they go for a job above the minimum wage? About everything you buy is made with labor done elsewhere.
This looks like a real trap for elderly people who hire someone to help them just get through life day to day. The federal bulletin says that if some specialized training would normally be needed to perform some of the duties (simple first aid training? hand out medications on schedule?) that the min. wage and hour laws apply. The employee who stays overnight a few times a week will suddenly be accruing big overtime at time and a half, based on the actual agreed hourly rate paid for the intended hours—not necessarily the legal minimum wage. The intended rules sound so vague, that the government bureaucrats could interpret them any way they like and let granny fight them in court. Obama’s Amerikka.
Dr. Sowell is polite to a fault.
I would have said "truly stupid elected leaders who have no clue about economics, logic and reason, and total ignorance about millennia of experience with real world human nature."