Home care workers have our lives in their hands. They're paid only $10 an hour.
Although home care workers have begun to make up an increasingly large subset of American employees, wages have been stagnant, at around $10 an hour. Home care is one of the fastest growing jobs in America, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the field to add more jobs than any other by 2024. Workers describe details of their 16-hour overnight work shifts and their clients who require constant, round-the-clock care. Many are also verbally abused and sexually harassed by their clients. The Obama administration made moves to protect workers in this field, extending minimum wage and overtime protections to them, and also gave them increased access to healthcare insurance. Before the Affordable Care Act, one in three home care workers was uninsured. New plans by the Trump administration to repeal the ACA could result in 1.8 to 3 million jobs being lost in the health care industry as premiums rise and people lose their insurance, with almost a quarter of those jobs being lost in home care. This would disproportionately affect women of color and immigrant women, who make up the majority of the home care workforce, and will continue to do the bulk of unpaid work when budgets for paid care fall through.
See "Home care workers have our lives in their hands. They're paid only $10 an hour.", Sarah Jaffe, The Guardian, July 14, 2017