The Law Of Unintended Consequences: Home Health Companion Version
It is bizarre to me that we have so many elected officials in power who cannot think two steps ahead. Or even one. Or even squint off into the distance to look at the likely effects of some new ruling or piece of legislation.
The latest is a U.S. Department of Labor rule requiring that time-and-a-half overtime be paid to at-home attendants who put in more than 40 hours a week caring for a disabled or elderly person.
Walter Olson explains the rule and the ramifications at Cato:
Many home health aides provide live-in services, and overnight and weekend hours could result in their receiving substantial amounts of overtime pay," notes Steve Miller at the Society for Human Resource Management. Families employing such attendants will also be required to keep records of time worked. There are a few narrow, hard-to-use exceptions. The rule also brings attendants under minimum wage laws, but it's the overtime provision that has raised the most fear.This is a terrible rule. The fear and anger it has stirred is coming not just from commercial employment agencies, as some careless media accounts might leave you to think, but above all from elderly and disabled persons and their families and loved ones, who know that home attendant services are often the only alternative to institutional or nursing home care.
...Don't assume that companions themselves will benefit, even assuming they manage to stay employed. Many will simply see their hours cut back. (Cutting employees' hours as an adaptation to new law? Who could have seen that coming in the era of ObamaCare?) So instead of 12 hours x 6 days at one home spent playing gin rummy between client naps and making sure no health emergency is gathering, the work week will be reshuffled to constitute, say, 36-hour weeks for two different clients, resulting in twice the commuting and job search hassle, twice the handoffs to other attendants (always a time of elevated safety risk, as the medical world has learned to its regret before) and, for the disabled person, twice the number of unfamiliar faces cycling through the house.
If Congress can muster the will to stand up to the backers of the plan - notably unions, organized employment lawyers, and cause groups in the liberal foundation orbit - it could still move to block the rules before the effective date of January 2015.
I've never worked as a cleaning lady or nanny or eldercaretaker, but I have been a tutor which is similar.
Most people who hire tutors/nannies/etc don't hire full time workers, you hire them a couple hours a week or so.
You have two options...
1) Go through an agency, which will provide insurance, SS, etc.
2) Go with a freelancer you find word of mouth or on Craigslist, usually this is under the table.
Either way, if you're paying a tutor, you're paying around 40-100 an hour depending on the subject, experience, what you agree to, etc.
If you have a freelancer, the tutor gets everything. If you have an agency, the tutor gets 20-30 an hour. Which if you factor in travel time, may end up being about $15 an hour. (It's not unusual to tutor someone who lives half an hour away).
Guess how I preferred working?
With new laws saying you need to provide insurance and such, you're effectively making people hire their workers through agencies, who take a HUGE cut. Your average family isn't going to be able to figure out SS, because their tutor/maid/nanny is only there a couple hours a week, so how do you figure out overtime from that?
Tutoring through an agency was not fun because I'd earn 1/4-1/2 of what my skills were worth to a family.
It's not different with cleaning ladies, the agencies charge, say $25 an hour while paying the cleaning ladies $12.
When I was tutoring, I did sign up for some agencies to get extra work sent my way, but I also advertised on Craigslist and such. The agency was really for extra while I was building up my clientele. My preference, for obvious reasons, was freelance.
NicoleK at September 20, 2013 1:33 AM
The other place I've seen this sort of thing hurt people first hand is when I was adjunct faculty. Adjuncts are teachers at universities who teach lower-level classes, who don't do research or anything, just teach.
Well apparently if my school and the other schools in the area hired people full time, they had to provide benefits. Three classes was considered full time, ergo, no one was given three classes. Two classes did not pay very well at all.
So it worked ok for me, I'd laugh and call myself a housewife with a teaching hobby. I had benefits through my husband. But some people were trying to make a living at this, and so in order to earn enough money, they had to teach at several different universities, many of which were fairly far from each other. And they still didn't get benefits.
I'm sure they would rather teach 6 classes at the same place with no benefits, than have to spend time and gas money teaching 6 classes at 3 places, with no benefits.
NicoleK at September 20, 2013 5:30 AM
"...who know that home attendant services are often the only alternative to institutional or nursing home care."
Death panels. Just sayin'.
Cousin Dave at September 20, 2013 7:02 AM
Death panels. Just sayin'
I get a feeling that what is now going on is like Louis XV before the revolution (After me the deluge), or like Vienna just before 1914.
Stinky the Clown at September 20, 2013 7:53 AM
Please tell me how the Affordable Care Act is affordable?
Jim P. at September 20, 2013 7:39 PM
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