Home Care Worker Seeks Overtime Ruling

NEW YORK -- Evelyn Coke picked a tough line of work when she came to America.

For more than 20 years, the Jamaican immigrant bathed, changed, and fed the elderly and infirm, often staying with her clients for days on end. Although Coke liked helping people, she felt she was being "robbed." No matter how often she complained, she says, she couldn't persuade her employer to pay her for all the hours she worked.

Now Coke, herself elderly and infirm, is hoping for restitution. She has sued her former employer in a case that will be argued before the Supreme Court on Monday and could affect the livelihoods of the nation's 1 million home care aides, whose industry is exempt from having to pay overtime.

Coke, 73, is challenging a 1975 Labor Department regulation that exempts the industry from protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The law requires payment of "time and a half" for more than 40 hours of work in one week.

"I'm glad that it's come to everybody's attention," Coke, who raised five children on her own, said in an interview Thursday at her home in Queens. "People are supposed to get paid when they work."

Ruling in Coke's favor, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the Labor Department rule, saying it is inconsistent with congressional intent and other labor department rules.

Paying overtime would cost billions, the home care industry says.

In New York City, the annual cost of the Medicaid-funded Personal Care Services Program would rise by at least $250 million if the appeals court decision is allowed to stand, the city says. The Personal Care Services program pays 90 private companies to send 60,000 home attendants to the homes of low-income elderly and disabled.

Coke's former employer, Long Island Care at Home Ltd., says it would experience "tremendous and unsustainable losses" if it had to comply with federal overtime requirements.

The Bush administration and the company that employed Coke are aligned against her.

If Congress had wanted to apply the law's wage and overtime provisions to such workers, "it easily could have done so," the Bush administration said in papers filed in the case. Instead, Congress assigned the secretary of labor the task of deciding the issue, the administration added.

By exempting home care workers from overtime pay, the government was trying to make the services accessible to as many elderly and disabled people as possible, according to court papers filed in the case by employers organizations.