{"id":399478,"date":"2019-03-14T13:29:41","date_gmt":"2019-03-14T12:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/will-new-mexicos-historic-labor-win-spark-change-in-other-states\/"},"modified":"2019-03-14T13:29:41","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T12:29:41","slug":"will-new-mexicos-historic-labor-win-spark-change-in-other-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/will-new-mexicos-historic-labor-win-spark-change-in-other-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Will New Mexico’s Historic Labor Win Spark Change in Other States?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The New Mexico legislature just dealt a huge blow to the racist, sexist exclusion of domestic and home care workers from basic workplace rights, one that advocates hope will spark change throughout the country. With a 52 to 14 vote, lawmakers in the state House passed a bill<\/a> on Tuesday evening providing these workers with basic protections like minimum wage and overtime pay in state law for the first time. With prior passage in the Senate, it now heads to the governor\u2019s desk.<\/p>\n

In 2013, the U.S. Department of Labor announced<\/a><\/span> a rule change that brought home care workers under the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), ending a longstanding \u201ccompanionship exemption\u201d that had excluded them from basic workplace rights like making a minimum wage or being owed overtime pay for extra hours. It followed a change in 1974 that expanded the FLSA to cover domestic workers.<\/p>\n

But according to advocates, 17 states still don\u2019t fully include home care and domestic workers in their labor laws. New Mexico has been one of those holdouts, whose state law explicitly excludes domestic workers from the basics of a minimum wage and other job protections offered to nearly all other workers. That means state law doesn\u2019t require that they be paid the minimum wage or overtime for extra hours, nor protect them from retaliation or discrimination.<\/p>\n

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