For $8 an hour, B.O., a Kenyan immigrant who asked the Texas Observer to use only her initials for fear of workplace retaliation, once cared for six elderly patients in a Houston group home for as many as 90 hours a week—without any overtime pay. Every day from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m., she fed, bathed, monitored, and administered medication to the patients. If no dayshift worker arrived to relieve her, she said, she continued working through the next day and night. Her wages were so low that she got a second job cleaning homes.
Over time, B.O., who’s employed in an industry that’s notorious for exploiting women of color and immigrants, learned to protect herself. She now tries to secure a contract before starting work, to refuse extra duties, and to demand better wages and overtime pay. She’s even organized other domestic workers.
“It takes a toll on you,” she said. “By the time you try to get a nap, you have to start going back to work again. … You can’t do anything else because you’re so tired.”
Texas has 315,000 home health and personal care aides—the nation’s third-highest number, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). And in 2024, those Texans earned an average hourly wage of only $11.29, the second-lowest average wage earned by domestic workers among all 50 states. Another 109,000 Texans work as housekeepers and childcare workers.
Soon, these domestic workers and millions more nationwide may lose their right to demand even the federal minimum wage—a mere $7.25 per hour—or any overtime. Amid a blitzkrieg of deregulatory measures, Trump’s Department of Labor is quickly and quietly advancing a proposal to rescind a 2013 Obama-era rule, which would leave the vast majority of domestic workers without wage and hour protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The public comment period for this proposal ended September 2. Now, the Labor Department plans to “proceed on this rulemaking once we consider all the feedback received,” spokesperson Chauntra Rideaux told the Observer.
In an interview, Eileen Boris, a University of California-Santa Barbara professor of labor, race, and gender studies, described long-term U.S. efforts to exclude domestic workers from labor laws as “an afterlife of slavery.” Black men and women who performed agricultural or domestic work during and after slavery were “bargained out” of New Deal laws to appease racist Southern Democrats, like Representative James Wilcox, a Floridian who declared in 1937: “You cannot put the [Black man] and the white man on the same basis and get away with it.” Both domestic and agricultural workers were excluded from the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which guarantees the minimum wage and overtime pay for hours worked above 40 hours, and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which protects workers’ rights to organize, form a union, and collectively bargain with employers.
In 1974, Congress finally amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to include domestic workers, but it barred employees defined as “companions” from minimum wage and overtime protections and live-in domestic service employees from overtime protections. A year later, the Department of Labor instituted a rule that broadly defined “companionship service” and exempted third-party agency workers, such as those referred from home care staffing agencies. It wasn’t until 2013 that Obama’s Labor Department prohibited third-party agencies from claiming that exemption and redefined “companionship services” to limit that category to workers who spent less than 20 percent of their time on “assistance with activities of daily living.”
The Labor Department’s current proposal would turn back the clock to the 1970s and restore the exclusions.
Tiffany McAllister, a former home healthcare worker and current organizer with the Houston chapter of the domestic workers organization We Dream in Black, told the Observer that she and other domestic workers fought hard to secure the 2013 reform. The current proposal, she said, devalues their jobs. “Our members reject the label of ‘companion.’ They’re not companions. They perform wound care, administer medication, provide meals, are also chauffeurs, and support people living with dementia, mobility loss, and chronic illness,” McAllister said.
The pay is low, but the market for home care is huge—it was valued at $286 billion in 2024, including home health services, durable medical equipment (DME), hospice and palliative care, therapy, and personal care services, according to the United States Home Care and Market report.
Some Texas home care agency owners, like Marisol Reyes of Assisting Hands in Houston, posted public comments advocating for Trump’s reforms. Reyes wrote that the proposed rule would provide cheaper and better care to patients and “reduce service disruptions and caregiver turnover.” Reyes declined further comment by phone.
But some patients who rely on home care workers disagreed in their comments. “The work is physically hard, the pay right now is barely keeping up with other jobs,” Texan Margaret Holloway wrote. “There is a shortage of workers willing to even do these jobs because of the already low wages.”
In its own proposal, the Department of Labor predicted that the rule change could adversely affect the workforce: “These potential effects—longer work hours and/or less pay—could negatively impact the morale of affected home care workers and lead to increased employee turnover and difficulty attracting skilled workers to the industry.”
Still, Boris, the California professor, predicted the rule would pass, given Trump’s policy priorities. “It’s anti-regulation, it’s anti-Black and anti-immigrant, and it’s anti-social safety net. So these cuts that are coming together really exacerbate the crisis of care.”
If that happens, Boris said domestic workers organizations would likely push for reforms at the state or municipal levels. Nine northern or western states and three cities, including Seattle, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C., already have laws guaranteeing minimum wage, overtime pay, and safe working conditions for domestic workers. But the Texas Legislature is a hostile place for organized labor. And the state has outlawed local minimum wage increases since 2003 and city-level labor regulations more broadly since 2023, though litigation continues on the latter.
B.O., the Houston home health worker who’s been able to live off of one job for some time now, told the Observer she might need a second or even third gig if the proposed rule passes. “We won’t be able to take care of ourselves,” she said. “It’s just a whole ripple effect that’s going to take place.”
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