Organizing Home Care: - School of Social Service Administration

Draft Paper Not for Citation or Quotation with Authors’ Permission 4/24/2007
intent, obscured the palatable presence of those who perform care work for the welfare
state, like the case’s 73 year-old Jamaican immigrant respondent Evelyn Coke. 2
Today home health care stands as one of the fastest growing sectors of the
economy. However, the median hourly wage, adjusted for inflation, has dropped, leading
to high turnover rates. At the same time, the number of uneducated women aged 25 to 54,
who generally have filled such positions, has stagnated. 3 Concerns over who will care
and how will we pay for care now justify public policy that keeps home heath attendants
poor. Those who ask the Supreme Court to affirm the FLSA rule rationalize it on the
basis of expense. They warn, as did New York’s Corporation Counsel, that any other
outcome threatens “limiting consumer access and capping service levels” because of
increased government costs, an additional $279 million in wages for New York City
alone. 4
They pit consumers and workers against each other, as if the possibility of paid
care must depend on low wages.
Though the cost of homecare in the early 1970s rapidly rose in New York and
California, the states receiving the largest chunk of Medicaid, no evidence exists that
either Congress or the DOL excluded elder companions on that basis. Intent on rectifying
legacies of racism and sexism, Congress in 1974 intended to expand wage and hour
standards to private household workers, thought of as domestic servants, and bring
hospital and nursing home employees fully under the law. That home care in their minds
belonged to the policy realms of welfare, poverty, and old age, not labor standards, may
explain the confusion of such a champion of worker rights as the bill’s sponsor New
Jersey Democrat Harrison Williams. During Senate hearings, he analogized that “a
babysitter is there . . . to watch the youngsters” and that “‘companion,’ as we mean it, is