“I was also out of food,” Melissa, a 38-year-old home health aide from South Florida, said on a phone press conference organized by NDWA and the Economic Policy Institute [EPI].
Domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to both infection and layoffs because “they work with people,” said EPI state policy analyst Julia Wolfe.
The 2.25 million workers who clean houses and take care of children, the elderly and disabled are overwhelmingly female—more than 90-percent, according to EPI figures. More than 95-percent of the about 340,000 house cleaners and 500,000 nannies and home childcare workers are women, and more than 85-percent of the 1.4 million home health aides are.
It’s also an overwhelmingly low-wage job. The median income is $10.21 an hour, according to EPI. That also doesn’t count that many of New York’s 199,000 home health aides—the 190,000 who work through agencies are the most of any state—make less than minimum wage because they work 24-hour shifts, but only get paid for 13 hours. That’s all thanks to the state government’s legal fiction that home health aides don’t have to work during the other 11 hours spent in the client’s home.