President Obama is pushing the US Department of Labor to move forward on a rules change that would raise wages and require overtime pay for home health workers. According to a White House media release, 1.79 million Americans fall into this labor category. More than 90 percent of these workers are women, and roughly a third are black. The vast majority of home health professionals are employed by “staffing agencies.” And “close to 40 percent rely on public benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps.”
In its news release, the White House named which states already have overtime and minimum wage provisions for home health workers, which don’t, and which have some protections, but not all. We’ve cobbled the data together in a different way, and created this map showing how friendly states’ compensation laws are to home health workers. New England, for example, tends not to extend full compensation benefits to this class of worker. The exceptions here are Massachusetts and Maine.
We invite you to take a look–and tell us what you think in our comments section.
View the interactive map here.