Angela Engram, a home care worker in Pittsburgh, takes her client Linda Stokes for her daily walk. (Photo: Jeff Ricker for Capital & Main)
This story was originally published by Capital & Main.
For over twenty years, Denise Lugo has worked as a home health aide in Fayetteville, North Carolina, caring for elderly clients in their homes.
Workers like Lugo provide intimate care to seniors and people with disabilities who are unable to care for themselves. In an often grueling job, Lugo earns $15 an hour caring for two clients, handling everything from featherlight housework to housework to bathing, dressing and exercising.
However, the livelihoods of Lugo and 3 million home care workers across the country are now at risk due to… application by the Trump administration to strip them of their right to the federal minimum wage and overtime.
“If it weren’t for my caregiving income, I would be on the streets,” Lugo, who organizes with the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s We Dream in Black North Carolina chapter, wrote to the Department of Labor in an official comment on the proposed rule. “What would you do if one of your family members needed home health care and you couldn’t get it because you didn’t pay us enough?” she asked.
Workers like Lugo are mobilizing against a Trump administration proposal that reopens a loophole allowing employers to broadly classify care workers as “companions” who can be paid less than the minimum wage and are ineligible for overtime pay. The fight has also spurred efforts by workers to urge state and federal lawmakers to strengthen their rights, even as federal rights are being stripped away.
Nowadays, working from home is ubiquitous, at least in the case 9.8 million older people and disabled people relying on care workers to stay out of institutional care. Indeed, home care and personal care are expected to be one of the fastest-growing professions in the country to add almost 740,000 workers between 2024 and 2034, an augment of 17%. But without a federal minimum wage and overtime law, workers’ wages – and how easily employers can cut them – will vary depending on the state in which they are located.
“[T]intends to create a mosaic [state] law,” said Anamaria Segura, an attorney at Getman, Sweeney & Dunn, a Kingston, New York-based firm that combats wage theft from workers across the country, including home care aides.
At least a quarter of all home care workers will lose their eligibility for minimum wage and overtime under the Trump administration’s proposal because they live in states that do not have additional wage protections for home care workers. The rights of other people vary greatly. For example, in Pennsylvania, state law guarantees minimum wage and overtime for 94% home care workers employed by agencies, but not the 6% employed directly by their client. Meanwhile, home care workers in New York have been eligible for the minimum wage since 2010, when the state passed first state level Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights.
If Lugo’s agency decides to classify her as a companion, it can legally pay her even less than that state minimum wagewhich equates to the federal wage of $7.25 per hour. She will be left with two options: accept a lower salary or leave.
Change, part a set of 63 deregulations action by the U.S. Department of Labor is already being effectively implemented, said Mimi Whittaker, an attorney at the National Employment Law Project. Rulemaking is still a work in progress, but leadership resides in the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division instructed staff in July to immediately refrain from investigating home care agencies that have been accused of misclassifying workers as companions, and to drop any cases currently pending.
The agency is “currently reviewing and considering over 5,500 comments received on the department’s proposal,” a Labor Department official said in an email.
Home care employers, especially for-profit agencies, have often used “companionship“a loophole that existed from 1974 to 2015, said Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. In 1974, the Department of Labor extended wage and overtime protections to care workers unless they were “companions.” In 2013, regulatory authorities narrowed the definition of companionship and closed a legal loophole since 2015.
Before the 1974 change, care workers were not entitled to minimum wage or overtime pay because Congress excluded positions held primarily by black workers from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Today, the field is 84% of women and 67% non-white.
The move to reopen the companionship loophole was a “convenience to large corporations, home care agencies, [which are a] powerful industry [with] a lot of private equity investing,” Whittaker said majority home care agencies are for-profit, a increasing some of them are run by private equity groups.
The Home Care Association of America, an industry association, “lobbyed intensively with the DOL” to change the regulations, according to an August report. bulletin roughly 3,500 home care agencies in your membership.
Association too supplied members with a template comment that stated that a 2013 rule extending job protections to home care workers “limits access to affordable home care by increasing costs and administrative burdens for home care agencies.”
The American Home Care Association did not respond to requests for comment.
Home care industry experts expect the rule to be finalized soon. In September, before the government shutdown, attorney Angelo Spinola at the Polsinelli Law Firm he saidhome care and hospice agencies that his “best guess” is that the rule will go into effect in January.
Home care workers are opposing the proposed rule, marking the latest battle in a long fight to improve working conditions.
As soon as public comments on the July proposal became available, the National Domestic Workers Association, a workers’ advocacy group, coordinated 2,206 public comments from members and allies. The group too pushed extend the comment period. August 25 agency rejected this request. The comment period closed on September 2, with over 5,500 comments received.
September 2 letter to Secretary of Labor, Republican Pramila Jayapal, and more than 100 other Democratic representatives argued that the proposal would “threaten our nation’s care economy [and] destabilize an already underpaid workforce.”
Labor officials and attorneys general in Democratic-controlled states also shared their comments, arguing that the proposal would place a greater burden on states to address police wage theft.
The proposal also revived existing fights for stronger federal and state protections.
At the federal level 114 Democratic representatives were co-authors of the National Bill of Rights for Domestic Workers introduced by Rep. Jayapala in June. The legislation would provide minimum wage, overtime and anti-discrimination protections for care workers through changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act, which regulates wages and overtime, and the Civil Rights Act. So far, all House Republicans and 98 Democrats have declined to co-sponsor.
Even if the bill doesn’t pass, Whittaker said, the effort could support build momentum in campaigns to expand state labor protections. In some states, these efforts are more advanced than in others. Currently, about half of U.S. states have protections that at least partially address the vulnerability, although the details vary widely.
In September after approx lobbying pressure by the California United Domestic Workers and other caregivers, California passed a bill codifying overtime protections for home care workers into state law. (Disclosure: BCC is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)
Meanwhile, existing home care workers’ struggles have taken on a novel character, whether with unions or workers’ centers.
In Washington state, home care workers who belong to Service Employees International Union 775 recommended For successful a resolution on this election that supporters say will augment funding for long-term care and therefore job security for care workers. (Disclosure: SEIU provides financial support to Capital & Main.) In Illinois, home care workers at SEIU Healthcare Illinois have he demanded progressive taxation fund Home care for seniors threatened by Medicare cuts in the Republican-backed federal tax bill. There are 32,000 home care workers in Michigan unionized with SEIU Healthcare Michigan last October. In Pennsylvania, SEIU home care workers helped press The state legislature will adopt the 2026 budget in November, which will include: $21 million to raise the wages of care workers employed directly by their clients – the same workers who have been left unprotected thanks to a federal loophole.
And in Georgia, employees of that state Chapter We Dream in Black they were in favor of a Bill requiring Medicaid-funded home care agencies to share data on wages, benefits, job openings, and workforce demographics.
Angela Engram, A home care worker in Pittsburgh fears the change could put an end to paying her the overtime she needs.
Engram works over 60 hours a week caring for an elderly client who employs her directly. Engram said she does “everything” for the woman she cares for – grocery shopping, cleaning, helping her get dressed, coordinating doctor’s appointments and showing up in the evening if something is wrong – making $13.53 an hour. With overtime protections, he typically earns about $20.30 a week for every hour over 40 hours.
“I basically live on overtime pay,” she said. But if she’s classified as a companion rather than an employee, she could lose that.
“Without it, I wouldn’t be able to eat or pay my bills,” Engram said. Her husband is disabled and unable to work. Receives health insurance through an Affordable Care Act subsidized plan. In October, she began asking for 90-day prescriptions, anticipating they would become unavailable in Congress allows subsidies will expire.
“No overtime, my God, you can’t survive on $13.53 an hour,” Engram said. “I hardly do it now.
