There’s
no place like home”—unless you’re one of the 1.4 million home aides who assist elderly and disabled people but whom the Supreme Court last June abandoned to the feudal manors of the past. In Long Island Care at Home v. Evelyn Coke, the justices unanimously determined that the Department of Labor had the authority to place providers of home care outside the labor law. For seventy years, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) has guaranteed minimum wage and overtime compensation to the nation’s workers, but somehow one of the fastest growing occupations of the twenty-first century doesn’t deserve the status and protection of formal employment.
Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court’s champion of women’s rights, let anxieties over the availability, affordability, and quality of long-term care trump justice for this disproportionately minority, female labor force. She joined the opinion of Stephen Breyer, who during oral testimony had worried whether “millions of people” could af...
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