Bill requires overtime pay for home care workers

by Brian Leubitz

While overtime pay has been required for decades in most industries, domestic workers have always been exempted. While the logic is far from clear, home health care workers, nannies and other home care workers were simply left out of the arrangement. AB 241 changes that:

“Domestic workers are primarily women of color, many of them immigrants, and their work has not been respected in the past,” said Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), the bill’s author. “Now they will be entitled to overtime, like just about every other California working person.”(LA Times)

Now, that is not to say that AB 241 goes as far as Asm. Ammiano wanted to go with his domestic workers bill. Last year’s AB 889, which was vetoed by the governor (veto message here), would have guaranteed meal breaks and other rights.  However, this bill does commission a study to review the totality of working conditions for domestic workers to be completed by 2017 and that could provide the data for further protections.

All that being said, overtime is a great first step for domestic workers, and groups like Mujeres Unidas y Activas celebrated the victory yesterday at the signing.

MUA is so proud of this victory and the role we have played in this work over the past 8 years.  We know that the work truly just begins now – the work of educating workers about their rights and employers about their responsibilities, the work of building the base of organized worker to reach the thousands and hundreds of thousands in California, the work of sharing the story and model of our organizing campaign with our sisters across the country who are just starting this journey, the work of winning even more rights and protections for domestic workers, and the work of changing our culture to respect and recognize the work that makes all other work possible.