Last week I wrote this dairy One Of Those "Hard Choices" That Would Screw Low Wage Workers which was about a forthcoming decision by the Department of Labor as to whether it would implement new wage and hour regulations involving paying overtime to approximately 2 million home health care workers that were scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2015.
Predictably, employers who were already not doing the right thing and upset that they wouldn't be allowed to continue not doing the right thing, had a massive sad and lobbied the Labor Department to can the rule or delay it or for God's sake do something, but please let them continue to not pay people overtime when they worked overtime because somehow paying people adequately and fairly for the hours they worked would cause disruption in providing these necessary services.
As part of their argument some providers and Medicaid Directors seemed to doubt that they had the technology and tools in place that would be required to compute overtime (regular hourly wage by 1.5) and to write some larger paychecks.
To me, little worker bee that I am, it seems quite clear - we simply cannot displace a portion of the costs of providing necessary and vital services to seniors, the disabled and the homebound to the backs of the workers physically providing those services by literally picking their pockets and robbing their wages. If paying overtime will somehow deplete the budgets of the care providers, there is a simple and obvious solution - hire more workers. That's it. That's the choice.
Okay, well now we finally have the final decision from the Department of Labor. Drum roll please.
Even I, a seasoned connoisseur of governmental contortions, was impressed by the masterpiece of really disgusting political maneuvering and gymnastics put forth by the Department of Labor in it's latest decision. In a nutshell, the regulation will proceed as previously published BUT the rule will not be enforced for the first six months and in the second six months will be enforced only at the Department's "discretion".
Labor Department Upholds Home Health Care Pay Rule, Delays Enforcement
Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa), chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, defended the agency. The department “has done a tremendous amount of outreach to affected stakeholders, and is clearly taking careful steps to implement these changes in a thoughtful and balanced manner that will ensure a smooth transition,” he said in a statement.
Not all worker-advocacy groups were pleased. The Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute, a group that says it is focused on promoting quality direct-care jobs, said it was “disappointed” by the decision to delay enforcement. “The decision to delay means that 2 million home care workers—largely low-income women, and disproportionately women of color—will have to wait as long as another 12 months to receive even the most basic labor protections, guarantees that most other American workers take for granted,” the group’s president, Jodi Sturgeon, said in a statement.
Yes, America, all this pointless debate regarding exploitation and inequity is ended with one swift Solomonlike stroke from the lackeys inside the Department of Labor.
I imagine one of them leaping up from the conference table with his Eureka! insight -
"I've got it! We'll have regulations, we just won't "enforce" them! It works for the Fed and the SEC, why not us? And best of all, we can call it BALANCED!"
Isn't it fantastic that we live in a world where there can be regulations that are just officially ignored? Doesn't that work for everyone, when you think about it? It works for the people who are in favor of regulation as protections for workers and consumers and it also works for the people who hate regulation and oversight and view them as bureaucratic overreach - how cool is that?
Okay, the only downside is that even the Department of Labor can't just publish regulations and then tell people openly that they won't be enforced. The decision to screw the workers came with the caveat that they could only be screwed for six months without any penalty. Except of course for the workers who would still be losing their earned income, oh well, eggs, omelets, etc. After that, the Labor Department might enforce the regulation "at their discretion" for another six months. That will keep the employers on their toes since any enforcement will be arbitrary and capricious and not subject to any standards of conformity because isn't that what Federal oversight and regulation should be anyway, when you think about it?