The SC's decision to deny home-care workers the right to OT pay is speeding the race to the bottom

from The Nation:


What We Owe the Working Poor
Annette Bernhardt


The Supreme Court handed down an astonishing decision June 11, ruling that under federal law, home-care workers are not entitled to overtime pay or the minimum wage. Upholding outdated distinctions between those who labor inside and outside the home, the Court excluded more than one million workers from the right to earn a fair wage.

For the plaintiff, seventy-three-year old Evelyn Coke, the decision means that the many overtime hours she put in during decades as a home care worker will remain unacknowledged and underpaid. For our nation, the decision is a stark reversal of our goal to have all workers be treated equally under the law. Home care workers spend their days emptying bedpans, dressing wounds, and bathing and feeding those who are too old or too sick to care for themselves. But their median income is only $19,000 a year, and we apparently lack the will to at least guarantee overtime pay.

Unfortunately, Evelyn Coke and her fellow home-care workers aren't alone. The Court's ruling is only the latest symptom of an emerging trend in low-wage industries, where the fundamental legal protections that were hard-fought and hard-won in the last century are breaking down.

Some workers--like home health aides, domestic workers and agricultural workers--have for many years been excluded from one or more laws governing the workplace. Other workers are covered by those laws, but weak enforcement has left them unprotected. And growing numbers are falling through the cracks altogether, as employers push them outside the reach of legal protection by misclassifying them as independent contractors.

For the past three years, researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law have been documenting this problem in New York City. Industry by industry, we've conducted hundreds of interviews with workers, employers, government officials, community groups and legal services providers. Our report, Unregulated Work in the Global City, was released June 19.

What we found is a world that lies outside the experience and imagination of many Americans. It is a world in which workers are paid less than the minimum wage, and sometimes nothing at all; in which employers don't pay overtime for sixty-hour weeks or provide legally required meal breaks; in which health and safety regulations are routinely ignored; and in which workers are often punished for speaking up or trying to organize. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070716/bernhardt

They are running roughshod over our laws now with their Supreme Court.

Rp

:argh:

Is it revolution yet?