Legacies of slavery and Jim Crow

[gollygee]

This is an older article, updated because of an improvement in this issue, but there are still other legacies of this shameful part of America's past built into our society.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/home-health-care-workers-arent-guaranteed-minimum-wage-or-overtime-and-legacies

UPDATE (6/29/16): The Supreme Court this week declined to review Home Care Association of America v. Weil, in which the home health care industry challenged the Department of Labor’s extension of minimum wage and overtime protections to home health care workers.

The decision means that some 2 million home health care workers — 90 percent of whom are women and most of whom are women of color — will be entitled to basic wage and overtime protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (although the exclusion of agricultural workers from federal labor protections has yet to be remedied).

On August 21, 2015, The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit overturned a lower court ruling that had vacated the Department of Labor’s new protections for home health care workers. By declining to hear the case, the Supreme Court upheld the appeals court decision, rejecting a residual legacy of Jim Crow-era lawmaking and putting a long-overdue end to the shameful exclusion of home health care workers from federal protections.

(Start of original article)

Ever since the New Deal era, U.S. labor laws guaranteeing minimum wages and overtime pay have excluded workers who care for elderly individuals and people with disabilities in their homes. These home health care workers — 90 percent of whom are women and most of whom are women of color — perform strenuous labor for long hours, helping those who need assistance with everything from dressing to meal preparation to eating to going to the bathroom to getting around. To this very day, these workers are denied the basic protections of minimum wages and overtime pay, even as demand for their services grows. They are among the poorest workers in our country, barely getting by on low wages, with 23 percent living below the poverty line.

[choie]

1. These are workers who care

for our parents and other loved ones. How can organizations claim that they're not eligible for the minimum wage and other benefits. It's just disgusting.