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No OT pay for home care aides, court says
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 12, 2007
WASHINGTON - Home care workers are not entitled to overtime pay under federal law, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, a setback for a growing labor force of more than 1-million people. The unanimous decision came in the case of Evelyn Coke, a 73-year-old retiree who spent more than two decades helping the ill and the elderly and is now in failing health. The Labor Department did not exceed its authority when it excluded home care workers from overtime protection and "courts should defer to the department's rule, " Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, relieving employers and angering workers' rights groups. The Bush administration opposed Coke's challenge to the Labor Department's 1975 regulation. A new administration should rewrite it to give workers protection, said the Service Employees International Union, which represents hundreds of thousands of workers in that industry. The Clinton administration had drafted a regulation to cover the workers, but the rule was shelved after President Bush took office. Government lawyers told the Supreme Court in April that the goal is ensuring that the elderly who most need home care service receive it "at a reasonable cost." "When you try to apply traditional labor law to this home-care scenario it's really pretty impractical, " said Paul R. Hogan, founder of an Omaha, Neb., firm providing home health care services.
[Last modified June 12, 2007, 00:06:10]
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