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Independent Living News & Policy from the National Council on Independent Living

Information Alert: Advocacy Action Steps for Consumers and Advocates Regarding the New DOL Home Care Rule

Logos - Bazelon Center - National Senior Citizens Law Center - National Council on Independent Living - National Disability Rights Network - American Association of People with DisabilitiesThe Department of Labor (DOL) has issued a new regulation governing Home & Community Based Services for people with disabilities and seniors. This new rule will impact your state’s long-term care programs, particularly consumer-directed programs! Advocates and consumers must be knowledgeable about this rule and actively advocate to ensure that your state implements this rule in a way that harms consumers and their workers the least, in order to avoid cuts to services, dismantling of programs that allow consumers to control their own services, or limiting the workers’ hours and earnings.

Previously, most home and community based service workers were exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act’s (FLSA) minimum wage and overtime requirements. The new DOL regulations expand the FLSA’s requirements to most of these workers.

The following advocacy documents were jointly developed by a number of national advocacy organizations (including NCIL) who are concerned about the affect these rules will have on consumer directed programs.

Please see:

These documents outline important actions steps to take. However, NCIL also strongly believes we also need the implementation of these rules to be delayed 12 to 18 months to allow states time to adopt the suggestions made in these documents.

Please watch for further NCIL Alerts on delaying the implementation of these rules.