Department of Labor Exempts Domestic Workers From Minimum Wage

Economists might be optimistic, but most American households are struggling these days. If your household income is $100,000, you can barely afford necessities, even if you are outside of major metropolitan areas like Philadelphia. The price of everything from rent to groceries has increased, but wages and salaries have not. We work as hard as ever for money that does not go as far as it did when we started our current job. The most simplistic piece of financial advice is that, if you want to achieve financial wellbeing, you must increase your earnings or decrease your expenses, but it is difficult to do either of those things these days. The situation only seems to be worse, with many protections for workers getting weaker instead of stronger. If your debts get bigger each month even as you spend every waking moment working, you need a bigger debt relief solution than simply trying to form a snowball or avalanche out of your non-existent extra money. If you are working one or more low wage jobs and sinking deeper into debt each pay period, contact a Philadelphia debt relief lawyer.

More Bad News for Struggling Workers

The purpose of minimum wage laws is to ensure that workers who get paid by the hour get a living wage, because there are only so many hours in a week, a year, or a lifetime that you can spend working. Since the first minimum wage law in the United States went into effect in the 1930s, there have been exemptions to the minimum wage. For example, when employees get paid a monthly salary instead of an hourly wage, the employer does not have to calculate how much the employee will earn per hour, since the pay for salaried jobs is usually high enough that it evens out to more than the minimum wage per hour, even when the employee works more than 40 hours most weeks. In the beginning, domestic workers paid by the homeowners for whom they worked were exempt from the minimum wage. The rationale was that individual families do not have the resources to pay their employees the minimum wage, but companies do.

Since then, there has been a movement for fair pay for domestic workers, defined as people paid by the families in whose houses they work. This includes babysitters, cooks, house cleaners, and gardeners, among others. The argument has been that families should pay them in the same way as if they worked for staffing firms. Domestic workers are vulnerable to inconsistent working hours and pay schedules, since they are working around a family’s plans. This year, the Department of Labor declared that domestic workers will be exempt from the federal minimum wage. This is especially bad news for domestic workers in Pennsylvania, which does not have a state minimum wage and follows the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

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Source:

geneonline.com/domestic-workers-exempted-from-federal-minimum-wage-requirements-in-policy-shift/