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Governor Kate Brown signed a bill into law this week that provides new protections for nannies, housekeepers, and other domestic workers. The new law protects against harassment in the workplace and puts limits on workers' hours, requiring that they have at least one day off per week and at least eight hours of time off during a 24 hour period. Oregon is the fifth state to provide domestic workers with such protections. A similar bill failed to gain traction in the 2013 session. Think Out Loud host Dave Miller spoke with attorney Shayda Le about what the new law means for both workers and employers.
"These workers now have a structure available to them whereby they have the same types of protections that employees in more traditional employment relationships have been accustomed to for quite some time," Le explained.
Domestic workers were initially left out of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established many of the components of employment law that we are familiar with, such as minimum wage, overtime pay, rest breaks, etc.
"I think maybe for a lot of families, they don't consider their in-home help to be employees and therefore they don't naturally think of themselves as employers ... because of the personal nature of what the particular services are ... like caring and raising of children," Le says.
The cutoff for overtime pay is different for people who work in the home and people who actually live with their employers, but it does apply to all domestic workers, creating a new type of administrative responsibility for employers. And it could change the way people structure employment in their homes.
Le says, "It may come down to paying more, like overtime, and for some people it may come down to hiring a second person and having shifts."
There is also a provision in the law regarding culturally appropriate foods, which is designed to accommodate domestic workers who live with their employers. The law requires that those workers be able to cook their own food, which Le says may just come down to kitchen access, but it may have other implications as well.
The next step is for the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries to lay out specific regulations geared towards the practical implementation of this new law.
Editor's Note: This post has been edited to remove a quote that made an inaccurate statement about the new law.