In an unanimous decision, the Supreme Court decided that home care workers are NOT entitled to overtime pay, according to federal rules. This ruling affected over 1 MILLION health care workers.
Another blow against the little guy.
Monday, June 11, 2007
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Another blow for the independence of people with disabilities both under and over 65 who already have great difficulty finding and keeping home health aides due to the absurdly low pay. And of course another blow to workers' rights. Hard to believe it's 2007, feels more like 1907.
This is the thanks that they get for the grueling hours they work and for all of the issues they have to deal with. It's bad enough that they are not paid enough as is.
This provides no incentive for anyone to seek this out as a viable employment option. The nursing shortage in this country is already bad...and is getting worse every year. Some areas of the U.S. are taking in foreign workers to fill the nursing gap. The government pretends to be so concerned about terrorism and disasters... but the reality is... almost none of our big cities are ready for a mass casualty event. One of the reasons why is that there are not enough nurses.
That's one of the big holes in the U.S. healthcare system. Not enough nurses (or doctors for that matter). It's the same with the home health aides.
And as the population ages, there will be an even greater need for home aides.
This should be a top priority for the Surgeon General & the Secretary of Health...
Don't they see the importance of having quality people in these key positions?
This country needs to rearrange its priorities and decide what's important. This home health issue is part of a bigger problem... The most crucial positions in the country are not given priority.
It is getting so bad that we are seeing more and more negative results in these key positions.
We say that education is important... but look at teacher pay.
Public safety is important for most people, but look at police pay.
Emergency medical work is important as well as firefighting... but in many communities, these workers don't get enough (look at what the ground zero workers are dealing with regarding their healthcare).
We say health is important, but we don't pay to get good nurses. In fact, there are not even enough nursing schools to produce our own nurses. I suspect that we will be importing quite a bit of our nurse labor in the next decade or two. Migrant nurses???? I can't wrap my head around that.... But that is the direction that the medical industry seems to want to go...rather than paying American nurses a decent wage... it's all about money....at the expense of safety. I'm not saying that imported nurses won't be capable... but with things like language barriers... it raises the risk of mistakes. Understanding English and medical charts 100% is crucial in avoiding an accident...giving someone the wrong medicine or the wrong dosage.
The U.S. is neglecting all of its important human resource infrastructure...whether its nurses, teachers for bringing up the next generation, substitute teachers, building schools, support systems for parents, helping the elderly, child welfare workers (many child welfare agencies across the country are a mess), the public defender systems.... all being neglected.
If they just took a fraction of the money that is being wasted in Iraq right now on that bull---- war... we could solve nearly all of these problems....or at least make a lot of progress towards solving them.
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