New California Legislation Helps Protect Caregivers

California passed new legislation this year. The new legislation protects home care-workers / personal assistants who are taking care of people with disabilities.

The new legislation was discussed at eldercare lawyer Susan Geffen's "Raising Up your Parents" Eldercare seminar on Saturday November 12, 2016, at Rancho Palos Verdes Golf Club community room event.

Highlights

• The longest shift a care-worker can work now is nine hours and overtime must be paid.

• A care-worker must not be asked or told to work more than 45 hours in a week.

• Care-workers must be paid at least minimum wage.

• Families and people with disabilities  still can hire a care-worker directly, or use an agency. Hiring direct does not "get around" legislation. Otherwise, any attempt to bypass legislation can land the person or family in problems with the Labor Board.

• Average costs for fees for care-workers is $18-24/ hour. For low income persons who qualify, there may be vouchers or other benefits available to help cover costs.

• Families, or the person with disability, can no longer expect one person to pull a 24 hour shift - instead now, three people carry the responsibility of every 24 hour cycle.
• Care-workers receive time off for respite and vacation.

• "Being on-call" for a call to "come assist" is working.

About Employers

New California legislation also protects family caregivers who work outside the home. Employers now cannot annoy, harass, or dock pay, or put someone in jeopardy of losing their job because someone has to take care of someone at home who has disabilities, when the worker leaves their out-of-home job to go home to their family-member-care-job.

We are pulling up the exact references in legislation for our Readers.

California joins at least 16 other states that legislation in place now protecting care-workers.

Crisis Coaching highly recommends that families or people with disabilities hire through an home care-worker agency. Agencies must be licensed. Registered agencies do background checks  on their employees- no one is on  contract. You have an agency available covering the worker's worker's compensation, as well as helping to protect your person with disabilities should anything arise.

As always, if your person with disabilities has Alzheimer's or other form of dementia, bipolar, severe depression, or has other severe cognitive impairment, your family may want to strongly consider placing this person in adult residential care facility that has staff trained to best support your person. For most families, taking on full time care for a person with challenges which include the possibility of self-harm (suicide attempts), harming others (someone who may have tried to harm themselves in the past, may shift to try to hurt others), or is no longer able to self-manage (manage money, drive safely, hold logically sequential conversations consistently, no when to eat or drink water without prompts  - without waiting for others to feed them,  or knows when to go to bad or the bathroom, etc. ), probably is better suited to move into adult residential care for safety reasons.

Watch this blog-space for updates.

Tags: Calfiornia legislation, care-worker, caregiver, eldercare, labor laws, mental health, Susan Geffen