The NYT Editorial Board stood up for home health care providers today in an editorial criticizing the Labor Department regulation that doesn't require their employers to pay them overtime.
A retired home health aide who sued her employer for unpaid overtime lost big this week in the Supreme Court — and so did fairness and the health care system. A regulation that was ill-conceived and is cruelly applied is depriving an increasingly important group of health care providers of a decent living.
The editorial also called out the Supreme Court for their lack of sympathy for the 73-year-old plaintiff, Evelyn Coke, and other home health employees like her who work hard every day and still struggle to get by.
[The Supreme Court] ruled that Congress authorized the Labor Department to write the regulation on who was to be covered under the law and that the department properly did just that. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that, given those circumstances, deferring to the department’s rule “is what the law requires.”
That may be. But the justices were completely silent on the question of whether denying overtime to home health employees is good policy, let alone morally justifiable. Clearly it is neither. As the population ages, home health care has become one of the nation’s fastest growing occupations, with an estimated 650,000 aides currently employed — most of them by for-profit agencies. Most of them are low income, female and minority, a recipe for exploitation. The support of federal labor laws is crucial to ensure that the aides, entrusted with the care of the most vulnerable Americans, are treated with professionalism, fairness and dignity.