Workers' rights Gone With the Wind

Your European retirement jaunt: $25,750.

The travel trailer you always wanted: $75,439.

Season tickets to the symphony: $975.

Somebody to feed you and wipe your ass when you're too old and sick to do it yourself: Oh, about five bucks an hour. No overtime, though!

The Washington Post has the story of the Supreme Court's latest decision. (Oh, before you go, Mellie . . . will you have Mammy come in here to fluff my pillow? Tell her to bring me a julep while she's at it.)

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that workers in the fast-growing home-care industry are not entitled to overtime pay.

The court unanimously agreed that a 1975 Labor Department regulation exempting workers paid by third parties from minimum-wage and maximum-hour rules was a valid exercise of the power given to the agency by Congress.

(snip)

The home-care case was brought by Evelyn Coke, a 73-year-old retiree who worked for more than 20 years as a home-care provider. She sued her employer, Long Island Care at Home, because she was never paid overtime despite her long hours and sometimes overnight care for clients.

She and her lawyers challenged the Labor Department exemption, saying its development at a time when Congress was including more workers under wage and overtime laws could not be what lawmakers intended.

But the Bush administration said Congress clearly had left the decision up to the agency. Otherwise, the administration contended, wage and overtime provisions for companionship services would have been applied in the law.

The court, in an opinion by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, agreed.

"Where an agency rule sets forth important individual rights and duties . . . and where the rule itself is reasonable, then a court ordinarily assumes that Congress intended it to defer to the agency's determination," Breyer wrote.

The decision set aside a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that had allowed Coke's lawsuit to go forward.

Home-care workers make up one of the marketplace's fastest-growing occupations, the growth fueled by an aging population and a desire to keep more of the aged in their homes rather than in institutions.

Coke's supporters said the decision will make it even more difficult to find workers to take home-care jobs, which often are low-paying and come without benefits.

"If we are to avert a home-care crisis in America, our leaders must invest in living wages and health-care coverage for home-care workers to ensure that we can meet the home-care needs of our growing elderly population," said Gerry Hudson, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents about 400,000 of the estimated 1 million home-care workers.

"Unfortunately, today's Supreme Court ruling is a step in the wrong direction," he said.

But home-care agencies had said an adverse ruling would have meant scores of lawsuits seeking retroactive pay and future wages that would have sent the cost of care skyrocketing. New York City, for instance, told the court that its Medicaid payments for such care would rise by as much as $250 million under the appeals court's decision.

William A. Dombi, vice president for law for the National Association for Home Care and Hospice, welcomed the court's ruling in Long Island Care at Home v. Coke, but said he is sympathetic to the workers and the union.

The decision, he said, "doesn't resolve the underlying problem about proper levels of compensation."

OH, I WOULDN'T WORRY about finding people who'll do awful work for slave wages.

There's a great big country full of desperately poor people just to our south, a big undefended border that's not in the way a-tall and plenty of American businessmen ready and willing to exploit the hell out of every single illegal alien who'll take The Jobs Americans Aren't Willing to Do (TM).

And all we aging Boomers have to do is learn to say "I'm hungry" and "Please come clean me; I've soiled myself" en Espanol.

ALSO: The New York Times has the story here.