For more than two decades, Denise Lugo has worked as a home care worker in Fayetteville, North Carolina, caring for elderly clients in their homes.
Workers like Lugo provide intimate care for seniors and people with disabilities who cannot care for themselves. For what’s often grueling work, Lugo makes $15 an hour caring for two clients, juggling everything from light housekeeping to household errands to bathing, dressing and exercising.
But Lugo’s livelihood and that of 3 million home care workers across the country is now in peril under a proposal by the Trump administration to end their rights to federal minimum wage and overtime.
“Without my income from caregiving, I would be in the streets,” Lugo, who organizes with the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s We Dream in Black North Carolina chapter, wrote to the Department of Labor in an official comment on the proposed rule. “What would you do if one of your family members needed a home health aid [sic] and you can’t get one because you are not paying us enough?” she asked.
Workers like Lugo have been mobilizing against the Trump administration proposal, which reopens a loophole allowing employers to broadly classify care workers as “companions” who can be paid less than minimum wage and are not eligible for overtime pay. The fight has also energized workers’ efforts to push state and federal lawmakers to strengthen their rights even as federal ones are taken away.
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