This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 24th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

New rules from the Labor Department mean home health care workers must be paid to standard overtime rates.

One problem many workers might discover they don't like the new arrangement at all.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, says a change could be devastating

for many disabled and elderly Americans who

currently receive in-home care. So the Secretary of Labor, Thomas Perez, says that

almost 2 million home care workers are doing critical work providing services to people with disabilities and senior citizens who want to live in community settings and age in place in their family familiar surroundings, but when it comes to getting paid they're lumped into the same

category as teenage babysitters. He says it's wrong and unfair. So what is the Labor

Department done? the Labor Department done?

The Labor Department has cut out most of what was called the companionship exemption

and this is a longstanding feature of Federal Wage and our law which recognizes that the nature of work for a home

companion often a full-time live-in sometimes a part-time live-time live-in is simply different from let's say someone who works in a

factory and the companion may be there all the time, the basic job may be to keep the elderly person

from getting in trouble or to do things that the elderly person can't do for themselves,

like cook for themselves, which requires potentially being there all the time,

which is why it's often live in.

And so the concept of overtime, which kind of makes sense, if you're talking about the majority of the workforce working 9 to 5 just doesn't make as much sense or so it was thought at least until the Obama administration

decided to yank out this exemption. It seems that a lot of groups were really very much against this,

what was called leaders in the disability community, were opposed to this.

This was deeply controversial and fought from many different perspectives.

It scares a lot of people in the elder care area because very often for older people this is what keeps them out

...