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Justices to Hear Case on Wages of Home Aides
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE, The New York Times, March 25, 2007
Evelyn Coke sat in her wood-frame home in Corona, Queens, a hobbled figure, not realizing that this is supposed to be her moment in the spotlight.
For 20 years, she had cared for clients in their homes, bathing them, cooking for them, helping them dress and take their medications. But now, suffering from kidney failure, she is too ill to work.
Her mind and memory are not what they once were, she acknowledges, and as a result she is hazy about the important events that will take place on April 16. On that day, the Supreme Court of the United States is scheduled to hear oral arguments in a case in which Ms. Coke, a 73-year-old immigrant from Jamaica, is the sole plaintiff.
She is challenging Labor Department regulations that say home care attendants, who number 1.4 million, are not covered by federal minimum-wage and overtime laws.
“I loved my work, but the money was not good at all,” Ms. Coke said in a whispering voice, noting that she often worked three or four 24-hour days a week, sleeping at a client’s home, while hardly ever receiving time-and-a-half pay for overtime.
The stakes in her case are considerable, not least because home care attendant is one of the nation’s fastest growing occupations. There are expected to be nearly two million aides by 2014, as the elderly population grows and government pushes for the elderly to be cared for at home rather than in nursing homes, where costs are high.
Ms. Coke’s lawsuit has attracted powerful supporters and opponents.
The nation’s largest health care union, the Service Employees International Union, is backing Ms. Coke’s effort because a victory for her could mean larger paychecks for hundreds of thousands of home care aides, many of whom live in poverty.
AARP plans to file a brief backing Ms. Coke, arguing that the increased pay that would result from requiring overtime coverage would reduce turnover among home care aides and help prevent a shortage.
The federal government and the Bloomberg administration have lined up against her, arguing that a victory for Ms. Coke could greatly increase Medicare and Medicaid costs, perhaps causing a budget shortfall that could leave many of the elderly without home-care aides.
In a friend-of-the-court brief, the Bloomberg administration, joined by the New York State Association of Counties, argued, “In the worst cases, some clients, especially those with high hour needs, might no longer be able to be serviced in their homes and might have to be institutionalized.”
The Bloomberg administration said a victory for Ms. Coke could force the city, state and federal governments, which all finance home care through Medicaid, to pay $250 million more a year to the 60,000 home attendants who work in the city.
Some advocacy groups have criticized the city’s position, saying it conflicts with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s push to reduce poverty because keeping these aides exempt from overtime coverage would hold down their pay.
The defendant in Ms. Coke’s case is Long Island Care at Home, which is based in Westbury and employs 50 aides.
MaryAnn Osborne, Long Island Care’s vice president, said that a defeat in court could put her agency out of business because, with many aides working 60 or 70 hours a week, it might face huge overtime costs. Her agency pays aides $8 to $11 an hour, but a defeat in the Supreme Court would require the agency to pay time and a half, meaning $12 to $16.50 an hour, for overtime.
“This would be horrendous for the entire industry because the reimbursement rate we get won’t cover that type of money,” she said.
But supporters of Ms. Coke’s lawsuit say that if she wins, the government would most likely increase reimbursement rates to compensate for the overtime costs.
Ms. Coke said that Long Island Care made a lot of money off her, saying she earned just $7 an hour when she last worked there in 2001.
Moreover, she said, she did not get paid overtime for her 24-hour stints at homes in Great Neck, Roslyn, Manhasset and other communities.
She said she stopped working because she was hit by a car, injuring her shoulder, and she later had colon and kidney problems. “The job didn’t even give us health insurance,” said Ms. Coke, who goes to a dialysis clinic three times a week.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear her case after the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned Labor Department regulations that exempted home care aides from federal minimum-wage and overtime coverage, saying the exemption conflicted with Congress’s intent.
Before 1974, home care aides were generally covered by minimum-wage and overtime laws if they were employed by agencies. (Aides hired directly by families were not covered and will remain exempt from overtime regardless of the outcome of Ms. Coke’s case.)
In amending the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974, Congress extended minimum-wage and overtime coverage to household workers like maids and cooks but said that baby sitters and “companions” for the elderly and infirm would be exempt.
When the Labor Department first proposed regulations to enforce the changes in the law, it said that home care workers employed by agencies should continue to get overtime. But the department reversed itself in 1975, saying Congress had not intended to allow those workers overtime when it created the exemptions the year before.
But the Court of Appeals, sitting in Manhattan, wrote, “It is implausible, to say the least, that Congress, in wishing to expand F.L.S.A. coverage, would have wanted the Department of Labor to eliminate coverage for employees of third-party employers who had previously been covered.”
Those urging the Supreme Court to overturn that ruling say the Court of Appeals failed to show proper deference to the Labor Department’s decision-making authority.
Even with the exemption, few home care workers receive less than the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. But many do not receive any overtime premium even when they work more than 40 hours a week. (Under federal rules, workers who sleep in are generally paid for all extra hours on the job, less eight hours’ sleep time.)
Natasha Maye, a home care aide in Philadelphia who is part of a separate suit concerning the minimum wage, is rooting for Ms. Coke. She said that she earned, in effect, less than $5.15 an hour at her former agency because she was not paid for the two hours spent each day traveling between her three clients’ homes. Including travel time, she said, she often put in 60 hours a week and earned $300.
“I don’t think that’s fair,” she said. “We should be entitled to overtime and travel time.”
The Clinton administration, in its next-to-last day in office in 2001, proposed regulations that would restore minimum-wage and overtime protections to home care aides employed by agencies, arguing that the 1975 exemption clashed with Congressional intent. But in 2002, the Bush administration scrapped that proposal, concluding the revised rules would have a severe economic impact on clients, government budgets and home care agencies.
In its brief, Long Island Care at Home argued that exempting aides who worked for agencies was consistent with Congressional intent because some lawmakers back in 1974 voiced concerns about holding costs down. “The need to restrain costs in the case of third-party employees has only become more acute as agencies provide an increasing amount of needed care,” Long Island Care said.
But Craig Becker, the chief lawyer for Ms. Coke, argued that legislative history showed that the exemption to minimum wage and overtime laws was to apply only to baby sitters and companions who were employed directly by families and were not regular breadwinners.
“In its exemption for baby sitters and companions Congress had in mind the quintessential neighbor-to-neighbor relations,” Mr. Becker said. “Increasingly this is not a casual form of work akin to baby-sitting but a full-time regular type of employment.”
Ms. Coke became a plaintiff through unusual circumstances. After she was hit by the car six years ago, she hired a lawyer, Leon Greenberg. When seeking to determine her economic losses, Mr. Greenberg learned that she sometimes worked 70 or more hours a week without receiving any overtime premium.
He invited her to bring a test case challenging the federal exemption. Ms. Coke agreed. Mr. Greenberg is no longer involved in the case; her current legal costs are being paid by the service employees union.
And because of her condition, Ms. Coke now has her own, unpaid, home care aide: her son Michael, a computer technician.
She said she brought the lawsuit to help hundreds of thousands of home care workers like her for years to come. But she also said there was another reason. “I just hope I get some money from this,” she said.
Candidates Outline Ideas for Universal Health Care
By ROBERT PEAR, The New York Times, March 25, 2007
LAS VEGAS, March 24 — Seven Democratic candidates for president promised Saturday to guarantee health insurance for all, but they disagreed over how to pay for it and how fast it could be achieved.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York assailed the health insurance industry and said she would prohibit insurers from denying coverage or charging much higher premiums to people with medical problems.
John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, offered the most detailed plan for universal coverage, saying he would raise taxes to help pay the cost, which he estimated at $90 billion to $120 billion a year.
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois appeared less conversant with the details of health policy and sometimes found himself on the defensive, trying to explain why he had yet to offer a detailed plan to cover all Americans.
“The most important challenge is to build a political consensus around the need to solve this problem,” Mr. Obama said.
Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico offered a potpourri of ideas to achieve universal coverage, including tax credits to help people buy insurance and an option to let people ages 55 to 64 buy coverage through Medicare.
To help pay for his proposals, Mr. Richardson said, he would “get out of Iraq” and redirect money from the military to health care.
The candidates spoke at a forum on health care at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, sponsored by the Service Employees International Union and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal advocacy group. Sponsors of the forum said they had also invited Republican candidates, but none attended.
Health care is emerging as a top issue in the 2008 presidential race, as businesses join consumers in demanding action to curb costs and cover the uninsured.
Nevada has gained new prominence in the political calendar. It will provide an early test of voter sentiment in a Sunbelt state with a large Hispanic population, and the results here could help create momentum for a Democratic candidate going into New Hampshire. Nevada Democrats are scheduled to hold presidential caucuses on Jan. 19 next year, five days after the Iowa caucuses and three days before the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire.
Mrs. Clinton said she hoped to make health care “the No. 1 voting issue in the 2008 election.”
Her remarks were reminiscent of a speech she gave to the service employees union in May 1993, when she attacked “price gouging, cost shifting and unconscionable profiteering” in health care and the insurance industry.
On Saturday, she said that the failure of her proposal for universal coverage in 1994 made her more determined to achieve the goal now.
“It also makes me understand what we are up against,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We have to modernize and reform the way we deliver health care. But we have to change the way we finance it. That’s going to mean taking money away from people who make out really well right now.”
Mrs. Clinton complained that “insurance companies make money by spending a lot of money, and employing a lot of people, to avoid insuring you, and then if you’re insured, they try to avoid paying for the health care you receive.”
To deal with such problems, Mrs. Clinton said, “we could require that every insurance company had to insure everybody, with no exclusion for pre-existing conditions.”
Mr. Edwards, who disclosed on Thursday that his wife’s cancer had returned in an incurable form, reaffirmed that he was “definitely in the race for the duration.”
He said that he and his wife, Elizabeth, were getting “too much credit” for their courage and determination. Millions of women have had to struggle with cancer “without what we have, without great health care coverage, without knowing they can get all the medications they need,” he said.
“One of the reasons that I want to be president of the United States,” Mr. Edwards said, “is to make sure that every woman and every person in America gets the same kind of things we have.”
Under the Edwards plan, employers would have to cover their employees or pay into a fund that would finance coverage. Senators Clinton and Obama also expressed interest in this idea.
Mr. Edwards said he would help pay for his plan by “rolling back George Bush’s tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 a year.”
Mr. Richardson said universal coverage “could be achieved in my first year as president,” if voters sent more Democrats to Congress.
As president, he said, he would duplicate the steps he has taken as governor, to “cut junk food out of schools” and to ban smoking in most workplaces, including bars, restaurants and stores.
Mr. Obama said that he would be issuing a detailed plan “over the next couple of months” to achieve universal coverage by the end of the first term of the next president, in January 2013.
When asked why he did not have such a plan, he said, “Our campaign now is a little over eight weeks old.”
While most people get coverage through employers, Mr. Obama said, he wants to foster federal and state purchasing pools. Employers would still have the option of providing coverage, he said, but after 10 or 20 years, “many people may find that they get better coverage,” or better value, outside their employers.
Mr. Obama said he did not know how much it would cost to achieve universal coverage. In response to a question, he said, “I have not foreclosed the possibility that we might need additional revenue” to reach that goal.
“We should not underestimate the amount of money that could be saved in the existing system,” Mr. Obama said. But he opposed cuts in payments to hospitals, doctors and nurses.
Another candidate, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, emphasized his experience, saying that as president he could immediately begin work with Senate committee chairmen to forge a consensus on legislation to cover all Americans.
Mr. Dodd said he would push for legislation making it easier for nurses to form unions, even if they performed some supervisory duties.
Among the candidates at the forum, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio offered the most sweeping proposal, to create “a universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care system providing Medicare for all.”
“Health care is a right, not a privilege,” Mr. Kucinich said.
Another candidate, former Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska, called for “a universal single-payer plan.” He said he would give people vouchers, which could be used to pay doctors and hospitals, and a choice of five or six health plans.
A Tale of Power and Intrigue in the Lab, Based on Real Life
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times, March 27, 2007
On Nov. 1, 1991, outraged that his doctoral thesis had been passed over for an academic prize, a young physicist at the University of Iowa named Gang Lu opened fire at a physics department meeting. He killed five people and paralyzed another before taking his own life.
The shootings devastated Iowa City and shocked a nation not normally used to thinking of physics as a life-and-death pursuit. Now they have been transformed into a celluloid nightmare for the rest of us.
At the Sundance Film Festival in January, “Dark Matter,” a fictional account inspired by the shootings, won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best feature film dealing with science or technology — “not a genre that attracts a lot of people to work on,” in the words of Brian Greene, a physicist, mathematician and author from Columbia University who was on the panel of judges.
But the prize, not to mention a bloody ending reminiscent of “Bonnie and Clyde” or “The Wild Bunch,” may give a boost to its coming appearances on the film festival circuit. The movie, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, written by Billy Shebar and starring Meryl Streep and Aidan Quinn, follows the adventures of a graduate student from Beijing, Liu Xing, who arrives at a fictional Valley State University to study under a famous cosmologist, Jacob Reiser (played by Mr. Quinn). Ms. Streep plays a philanthropist and patron of the university, who is an aficionado of Chinese culture who befriends Chinese students.
The professor is first impressed with Liu’s brilliance and diligence but turns against him when he begins to pursue a project that goes against his mentor’s favorite theory. He pulls the rug out from Liu’s doctoral thesis, meaning that the student will have to leave school and seek a job without his degree. Instead Liu, played by Ye Liu, gets a gun.
The title refers to the invisible clouds of something that seem to swaddle the galaxies, and to provide the scaffolding for the structure and evolution of the visible universe. In the early ’90s, when the movie is set, the existence and extent and nature of this dark stuff were the hottest questions in cosmology, and the arguments, jargon and even the graphs brandished by the movie’s protagonists seem ripped from popular science writing of the time.
But the movie isn’t really about science.
As Mr. Chen, the director, said, “It’s about power, in a way.” That would be the nearly feudalistic power that a graduate adviser has over his student, who after 16 or more years sitting in a classroom listening and regurgitating information must now change gears and learn how to produce original research. That grueling process has been the crucible in which new scientists are made ever since Plato mentored Aristotle, and although it rarely leads to murder [adjoining article], it can often lead to disaffection, strife and lifelong feuds.
“The film did a really good job of capturing the atmosphere of a research lab,” Dr. Greene said.
“Graduate students are like apprentices,” said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. “It’s from another era. It’s something we don’t do well anymore, hand-crafted training.”
Advisers, he noted, write recommendations, decide when it is time for a student to defend his or her thesis and divvy up credit for the work that gets done together. Astronomers still argue about whether Jocelyn Burnell-Bell, who discovered the first pulsar while a graduate student at Cambridge University in England, should have shared in the subsequent Nobel Prize given to her adviser, Antony Hewish.
Janet D. Stemwedel, a philosopher at San Jose State University, recently wrote on her blog, doctorfreeride.blogspot.com, “It’s hard to understand just how powerless you can feel as a graduate student unless you have been a graduate student.”
Dr. Turner said: “The bond between student and adviser is almost like getting married. You’re going to be working and interacting with this person the rest of your life.”
As the movie makes clear, the passage from student to junior colleague is only heightened in ambiguity and tension when you are thousands of miles from home and hardly speak the language.
James Dickerson, a physicist at Vanderbilt University who leads a committee on minorities in physics for the American Physical Society, said Asian students were often marginalized because of a perception, which he called “unstated racism,” that they are exceptionally smart and are there to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As a result they wind up as cogs in the research machine and remain isolated from the rest of the community and the culture.
“It’s something not widely discussed in the physics community,” Dr. Dickerson said.
Shing-Tung Yau, a Harvard mathematics professor and mentor of many young mathematicians, said China’s one-child policy has added to the pressure on students.
“The Chinese family in general has high expectation on their children,” he said in an e-mail message. “When they realize that they cannot achieve it, they get very upset, especially the whole family have been telling their friends about him or her.”
“They also compete among themselves severely,” Dr. Yau added. “I observed that within my students.”
Dr. Lu, the Iowa gunman, was part of a wave of Chinese students recruited to come to Iowa to study plasma physics in the 1980s, when China was opening up to the West again after the Cultural Revolution.
Gerald Payne, a physics professor at Iowa then and now, said: “The selection process was very rigorous. We had exceptional students from China.”
By all accounts, however, Dr. Lu was troubled. Dr. Payne described him as very competitive and a loner, not good at socializing or expressing himself. He had isolated himself from other Chinese students and was living alone.
Mr. Chen, the director, said that he had met Dr. Lu’s sister in Beijing and that she had described him as someone who knew how to get good grades and go to the top, but who had “no living skill.”
Dr. Lu got his doctorate in the spring of 1991, but he failed to win the university’s $2,500 Spriesterbach Prize. The university gave it instead to his former roommate and perceived rival, Linhua Shan, and Dr. Lu complained to university officials.
Dr. Payne said that Dr. Lu’s adviser, Christoph K. Goertz, and the physics chairman, Dwight R. Nicholson, both of whom were killed, along with Dr. Shan, had been trying to help him, and had written him strong letters of recommendation for his job search. “People were addressing the issue; he was just being unrealistic in his demands,” he said. “His adviser was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. It was really sad.”
Mr. Chen, who is best known for directing operas, was a graduate student at New York University at the time. He recalled being puzzled by the shootings and the response. One Chinese language newspaper, he said, ran a front-page apology for the shootings, in language its intended recipients couldn’t read. At the same time he saw a screen saver from a Chinese student association that read “Long live Gang Lu.”
He said: “They held him as a hero. That really shocked me.”
The story resonated with Mr. Chen’s own experiences and that of friends who came to the United States with huge expectations and found themselves lost or on the wrong end of a power struggle with their mentors, and who either went back home or, in the case of one good friend, simply disappeared.
He said: “A lot of people came in late ’80s. They never found a balance between the idea of America and the America they experienced.”
The resulting movie is part autobiographical and deliberately steers away from a direct replication of Gang Lu’s story, partly out of respect for the families of the victims. One small change was to switch the action from plasma physics to cosmology, a jazzier subject whose abiding theme, dark matter, had a plethora of metaphorical meanings to Mr. Chen, among them a difference between East and West.
“In Chinese culture,” he explained, “the most profound world is intangible and invisible. Here, everything has to be proven, material.”
A more significant change was in the character of the protagonist. The character Liu Xing seems sunnier and more connected to the people around him, even to the extent of courting a local waitress, than the moody and isolated Gang Lu. Much of the onus of being the bad guy shifts to the adviser, who takes advantage of his student and then betrays him.
The ending is abrupt and, indeed, dark. A review on Variety magazine’s Web site complained that the violence came with little foreshadowing.
Indeed, Dr. Greene said that some of the Sundance judges thought the movie worked fine without the ending. “We don’t want to put out the idea that homicidal graduate students are a dime a dozen,” he said.
Mr. Chen said he wanted to tell the story of Liu Xing’s disillusionment without pointing a finger at who did what. Dr. Payne said Iowans worried that the movie would be taken as literal truth, leaving the impression that professors there had taken advantage of their graduate students. “I don’t see that perception in my graduate students,” he said. “When they come back they have good memories.”
“When these things happen, people always look for a reason,” he said, but added that Iowa had always treated its graduate students well, as colleagues and not indentured servants.
Nevertheless, he said, the university has tried to have more frequent and more regular get-togethers, like pizza parties and meetings. “Some of those things you should be doing anyway; it’s just part of a good education,” Dr. Payne said. “Some of that is a result of the shootings.”
“We didn’t ignore the shootings,” he said. “You get past those things, but you don’t forget them.”
Basic Instincts: Cutting Back Without Deprivation
By M. P. DUNLEAVEY, The New York Times, February 24, 2007
It sounds like something that would happen in San Francisco. In 2005, a few friends gathered for dinner and started bemoaning the fate of the planet, the environmental impact of consumer excess — and ended up challenging one another to not buy anything new for six months.
By mid-2006, the rapidly growing group was featured on the “Today” show, and people were calling it a movement.
“We think of it as more of a phenomenon than a movement,” said John Perry, a co-founder of the group, now known as the Compact. “We’re grateful for our 17 minutes of fame,” he added, “but we didn’t intend this to be broadcast. We didn’t mean to attract followers.”
Yet for such a simple and not terribly sexy idea — to buy nothing new, other than food and other absolute essentials — the Compact has managed to build a groundswell of supporters. The group has more than doubled since the fall, to nearly 8,000 members from 3,000. It has even found a footing in Europe and Australia.
If Thoreau comes to mind, Mr. Perry would be the first to agree that “there is nothing new or startling” about the Compact. The main difference between the Compact and other organizations with an antimaterialism bent, like Voluntary Simplicity, he said, is that the aim of the Compact is not just to scale back financially but to reduce the environmental toll of the American consumer lifestyle.
Compact members reuse or recycle what they have and buy only used or secondhand goods — except for food, health-related items and personal things, like socks and underwear. You can spend as much as you like on life’s more intangible pleasures, like travel, sports, music and other cultural activities.
Although the group took its name from the Mayflower Compact of 1620, it is not as Puritan as it sounds. As Marlaina Abbott-Ross, a Compact member who runs a small advertising agency in Charleston, S.C., put it: “It’s about mindful consumerism, not about depriving ourselves.”
When Mrs. Abbott-Ross first joined the Compact about a year ago, she was a nonstop shopper.
Packages would arrive from eBay and she wouldn’t remember what she had ordered. “I was starting to feel overwhelmed: by the clutter, by the credit card bills, by all this stuff we didn’t need.”
Now, she says, “I don’t even think about spending.” The result is not only an extra cushion of cash, “it’s a huge stress reducer,” she said. “Now I can buy what I want, whether it’s a nice bottle of wine or organic food for my family.”
To the extent that the Compact has any structure at all, it exists on Yahoo Groups (groups.yahoo.com/group/thecompact) where people can join threaded discussions about things like the temptations of Costco or whether your friends look at you askance (which many do, members report).
Mr. Perry monitors the group and has read thousands of statements about people’s reasons for joining. “I think we’ve touched a bundle of angry nerves,” he said. “People are worn out and hung over by all the stuff in their lives. Many have terrible consumer debt. They feel out of control.”
What may contribute to the Compact’s success, Mr. Perry thinks, is that it gives people a place to talk. “You can’t go to a cocktail party and say, ‘Hey, I’m $30,000 in debt, and I’m addicted to The Shopping Channel.’ ”
WHILE the chance to let your hair down financially may provide some relief, the Compact offers a surprising payoff. Yes, the group’s secondhand-buying strategy has helped members to save money, pay off their credit card debts and pad their children’s college funds. And it gives people the satisfaction of knowing they are contributing less to the local landfill.
The much bigger dividend gained by many members is time.
“When you don’t go to stores, you spend a lot more time doing other things,” said Mr. Perry, who has traded his own “recreational shopping habit” for a plot in the community garden, eating out with friends and volunteering at his son’s school.
Bridget Stuart, a real estate agent in Laguna Beach, Calif., who joined the Compact in December, experienced a similar windfall of time. Now she invites friends over for dinner and to play board games and takes walks with her children in lieu of cruising the mall.
“I’m even getting back into tennis,” she said. “I used to play tennis all the time, and the biggest thing that supplanted it was shopping. That’s crazy. I actually feel like this is getting me back to the way I want to live.”
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE, The New York Times, March 25, 2007
Evelyn Coke sat in her wood-frame home in Corona, Queens, a hobbled figure, not realizing that this is supposed to be her moment in the spotlight.
For 20 years, she had cared for clients in their homes, bathing them, cooking for them, helping them dress and take their medications. But now, suffering from kidney failure, she is too ill to work.
Her mind and memory are not what they once were, she acknowledges, and as a result she is hazy about the important events that will take place on April 16. On that day, the Supreme Court of the United States is scheduled to hear oral arguments in a case in which Ms. Coke, a 73-year-old immigrant from Jamaica, is the sole plaintiff.
She is challenging Labor Department regulations that say home care attendants, who number 1.4 million, are not covered by federal minimum-wage and overtime laws.
“I loved my work, but the money was not good at all,” Ms. Coke said in a whispering voice, noting that she often worked three or four 24-hour days a week, sleeping at a client’s home, while hardly ever receiving time-and-a-half pay for overtime.
The stakes in her case are considerable, not least because home care attendant is one of the nation’s fastest growing occupations. There are expected to be nearly two million aides by 2014, as the elderly population grows and government pushes for the elderly to be cared for at home rather than in nursing homes, where costs are high.
Ms. Coke’s lawsuit has attracted powerful supporters and opponents.
The nation’s largest health care union, the Service Employees International Union, is backing Ms. Coke’s effort because a victory for her could mean larger paychecks for hundreds of thousands of home care aides, many of whom live in poverty.
AARP plans to file a brief backing Ms. Coke, arguing that the increased pay that would result from requiring overtime coverage would reduce turnover among home care aides and help prevent a shortage.
The federal government and the Bloomberg administration have lined up against her, arguing that a victory for Ms. Coke could greatly increase Medicare and Medicaid costs, perhaps causing a budget shortfall that could leave many of the elderly without home-care aides.
In a friend-of-the-court brief, the Bloomberg administration, joined by the New York State Association of Counties, argued, “In the worst cases, some clients, especially those with high hour needs, might no longer be able to be serviced in their homes and might have to be institutionalized.”
The Bloomberg administration said a victory for Ms. Coke could force the city, state and federal governments, which all finance home care through Medicaid, to pay $250 million more a year to the 60,000 home attendants who work in the city.
Some advocacy groups have criticized the city’s position, saying it conflicts with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s push to reduce poverty because keeping these aides exempt from overtime coverage would hold down their pay.
The defendant in Ms. Coke’s case is Long Island Care at Home, which is based in Westbury and employs 50 aides.
MaryAnn Osborne, Long Island Care’s vice president, said that a defeat in court could put her agency out of business because, with many aides working 60 or 70 hours a week, it might face huge overtime costs. Her agency pays aides $8 to $11 an hour, but a defeat in the Supreme Court would require the agency to pay time and a half, meaning $12 to $16.50 an hour, for overtime.
“This would be horrendous for the entire industry because the reimbursement rate we get won’t cover that type of money,” she said.
But supporters of Ms. Coke’s lawsuit say that if she wins, the government would most likely increase reimbursement rates to compensate for the overtime costs.
Ms. Coke said that Long Island Care made a lot of money off her, saying she earned just $7 an hour when she last worked there in 2001.
Moreover, she said, she did not get paid overtime for her 24-hour stints at homes in Great Neck, Roslyn, Manhasset and other communities.
She said she stopped working because she was hit by a car, injuring her shoulder, and she later had colon and kidney problems. “The job didn’t even give us health insurance,” said Ms. Coke, who goes to a dialysis clinic three times a week.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear her case after the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned Labor Department regulations that exempted home care aides from federal minimum-wage and overtime coverage, saying the exemption conflicted with Congress’s intent.
Before 1974, home care aides were generally covered by minimum-wage and overtime laws if they were employed by agencies. (Aides hired directly by families were not covered and will remain exempt from overtime regardless of the outcome of Ms. Coke’s case.)
In amending the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974, Congress extended minimum-wage and overtime coverage to household workers like maids and cooks but said that baby sitters and “companions” for the elderly and infirm would be exempt.
When the Labor Department first proposed regulations to enforce the changes in the law, it said that home care workers employed by agencies should continue to get overtime. But the department reversed itself in 1975, saying Congress had not intended to allow those workers overtime when it created the exemptions the year before.
But the Court of Appeals, sitting in Manhattan, wrote, “It is implausible, to say the least, that Congress, in wishing to expand F.L.S.A. coverage, would have wanted the Department of Labor to eliminate coverage for employees of third-party employers who had previously been covered.”
Those urging the Supreme Court to overturn that ruling say the Court of Appeals failed to show proper deference to the Labor Department’s decision-making authority.
Even with the exemption, few home care workers receive less than the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. But many do not receive any overtime premium even when they work more than 40 hours a week. (Under federal rules, workers who sleep in are generally paid for all extra hours on the job, less eight hours’ sleep time.)
Natasha Maye, a home care aide in Philadelphia who is part of a separate suit concerning the minimum wage, is rooting for Ms. Coke. She said that she earned, in effect, less than $5.15 an hour at her former agency because she was not paid for the two hours spent each day traveling between her three clients’ homes. Including travel time, she said, she often put in 60 hours a week and earned $300.
“I don’t think that’s fair,” she said. “We should be entitled to overtime and travel time.”
The Clinton administration, in its next-to-last day in office in 2001, proposed regulations that would restore minimum-wage and overtime protections to home care aides employed by agencies, arguing that the 1975 exemption clashed with Congressional intent. But in 2002, the Bush administration scrapped that proposal, concluding the revised rules would have a severe economic impact on clients, government budgets and home care agencies.
In its brief, Long Island Care at Home argued that exempting aides who worked for agencies was consistent with Congressional intent because some lawmakers back in 1974 voiced concerns about holding costs down. “The need to restrain costs in the case of third-party employees has only become more acute as agencies provide an increasing amount of needed care,” Long Island Care said.
But Craig Becker, the chief lawyer for Ms. Coke, argued that legislative history showed that the exemption to minimum wage and overtime laws was to apply only to baby sitters and companions who were employed directly by families and were not regular breadwinners.
“In its exemption for baby sitters and companions Congress had in mind the quintessential neighbor-to-neighbor relations,” Mr. Becker said. “Increasingly this is not a casual form of work akin to baby-sitting but a full-time regular type of employment.”
Ms. Coke became a plaintiff through unusual circumstances. After she was hit by the car six years ago, she hired a lawyer, Leon Greenberg. When seeking to determine her economic losses, Mr. Greenberg learned that she sometimes worked 70 or more hours a week without receiving any overtime premium.
He invited her to bring a test case challenging the federal exemption. Ms. Coke agreed. Mr. Greenberg is no longer involved in the case; her current legal costs are being paid by the service employees union.
And because of her condition, Ms. Coke now has her own, unpaid, home care aide: her son Michael, a computer technician.
She said she brought the lawsuit to help hundreds of thousands of home care workers like her for years to come. But she also said there was another reason. “I just hope I get some money from this,” she said.
Candidates Outline Ideas for Universal Health Care
By ROBERT PEAR, The New York Times, March 25, 2007
LAS VEGAS, March 24 — Seven Democratic candidates for president promised Saturday to guarantee health insurance for all, but they disagreed over how to pay for it and how fast it could be achieved.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York assailed the health insurance industry and said she would prohibit insurers from denying coverage or charging much higher premiums to people with medical problems.
John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, offered the most detailed plan for universal coverage, saying he would raise taxes to help pay the cost, which he estimated at $90 billion to $120 billion a year.
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois appeared less conversant with the details of health policy and sometimes found himself on the defensive, trying to explain why he had yet to offer a detailed plan to cover all Americans.
“The most important challenge is to build a political consensus around the need to solve this problem,” Mr. Obama said.
Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico offered a potpourri of ideas to achieve universal coverage, including tax credits to help people buy insurance and an option to let people ages 55 to 64 buy coverage through Medicare.
To help pay for his proposals, Mr. Richardson said, he would “get out of Iraq” and redirect money from the military to health care.
The candidates spoke at a forum on health care at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, sponsored by the Service Employees International Union and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal advocacy group. Sponsors of the forum said they had also invited Republican candidates, but none attended.
Health care is emerging as a top issue in the 2008 presidential race, as businesses join consumers in demanding action to curb costs and cover the uninsured.
Nevada has gained new prominence in the political calendar. It will provide an early test of voter sentiment in a Sunbelt state with a large Hispanic population, and the results here could help create momentum for a Democratic candidate going into New Hampshire. Nevada Democrats are scheduled to hold presidential caucuses on Jan. 19 next year, five days after the Iowa caucuses and three days before the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire.
Mrs. Clinton said she hoped to make health care “the No. 1 voting issue in the 2008 election.”
Her remarks were reminiscent of a speech she gave to the service employees union in May 1993, when she attacked “price gouging, cost shifting and unconscionable profiteering” in health care and the insurance industry.
On Saturday, she said that the failure of her proposal for universal coverage in 1994 made her more determined to achieve the goal now.
“It also makes me understand what we are up against,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We have to modernize and reform the way we deliver health care. But we have to change the way we finance it. That’s going to mean taking money away from people who make out really well right now.”
Mrs. Clinton complained that “insurance companies make money by spending a lot of money, and employing a lot of people, to avoid insuring you, and then if you’re insured, they try to avoid paying for the health care you receive.”
To deal with such problems, Mrs. Clinton said, “we could require that every insurance company had to insure everybody, with no exclusion for pre-existing conditions.”
Mr. Edwards, who disclosed on Thursday that his wife’s cancer had returned in an incurable form, reaffirmed that he was “definitely in the race for the duration.”
He said that he and his wife, Elizabeth, were getting “too much credit” for their courage and determination. Millions of women have had to struggle with cancer “without what we have, without great health care coverage, without knowing they can get all the medications they need,” he said.
“One of the reasons that I want to be president of the United States,” Mr. Edwards said, “is to make sure that every woman and every person in America gets the same kind of things we have.”
Under the Edwards plan, employers would have to cover their employees or pay into a fund that would finance coverage. Senators Clinton and Obama also expressed interest in this idea.
Mr. Edwards said he would help pay for his plan by “rolling back George Bush’s tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 a year.”
Mr. Richardson said universal coverage “could be achieved in my first year as president,” if voters sent more Democrats to Congress.
As president, he said, he would duplicate the steps he has taken as governor, to “cut junk food out of schools” and to ban smoking in most workplaces, including bars, restaurants and stores.
Mr. Obama said that he would be issuing a detailed plan “over the next couple of months” to achieve universal coverage by the end of the first term of the next president, in January 2013.
When asked why he did not have such a plan, he said, “Our campaign now is a little over eight weeks old.”
While most people get coverage through employers, Mr. Obama said, he wants to foster federal and state purchasing pools. Employers would still have the option of providing coverage, he said, but after 10 or 20 years, “many people may find that they get better coverage,” or better value, outside their employers.
Mr. Obama said he did not know how much it would cost to achieve universal coverage. In response to a question, he said, “I have not foreclosed the possibility that we might need additional revenue” to reach that goal.
“We should not underestimate the amount of money that could be saved in the existing system,” Mr. Obama said. But he opposed cuts in payments to hospitals, doctors and nurses.
Another candidate, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, emphasized his experience, saying that as president he could immediately begin work with Senate committee chairmen to forge a consensus on legislation to cover all Americans.
Mr. Dodd said he would push for legislation making it easier for nurses to form unions, even if they performed some supervisory duties.
Among the candidates at the forum, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio offered the most sweeping proposal, to create “a universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care system providing Medicare for all.”
“Health care is a right, not a privilege,” Mr. Kucinich said.
Another candidate, former Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska, called for “a universal single-payer plan.” He said he would give people vouchers, which could be used to pay doctors and hospitals, and a choice of five or six health plans.
A Tale of Power and Intrigue in the Lab, Based on Real Life
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times, March 27, 2007
On Nov. 1, 1991, outraged that his doctoral thesis had been passed over for an academic prize, a young physicist at the University of Iowa named Gang Lu opened fire at a physics department meeting. He killed five people and paralyzed another before taking his own life.
The shootings devastated Iowa City and shocked a nation not normally used to thinking of physics as a life-and-death pursuit. Now they have been transformed into a celluloid nightmare for the rest of us.
At the Sundance Film Festival in January, “Dark Matter,” a fictional account inspired by the shootings, won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best feature film dealing with science or technology — “not a genre that attracts a lot of people to work on,” in the words of Brian Greene, a physicist, mathematician and author from Columbia University who was on the panel of judges.
But the prize, not to mention a bloody ending reminiscent of “Bonnie and Clyde” or “The Wild Bunch,” may give a boost to its coming appearances on the film festival circuit. The movie, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, written by Billy Shebar and starring Meryl Streep and Aidan Quinn, follows the adventures of a graduate student from Beijing, Liu Xing, who arrives at a fictional Valley State University to study under a famous cosmologist, Jacob Reiser (played by Mr. Quinn). Ms. Streep plays a philanthropist and patron of the university, who is an aficionado of Chinese culture who befriends Chinese students.
The professor is first impressed with Liu’s brilliance and diligence but turns against him when he begins to pursue a project that goes against his mentor’s favorite theory. He pulls the rug out from Liu’s doctoral thesis, meaning that the student will have to leave school and seek a job without his degree. Instead Liu, played by Ye Liu, gets a gun.
The title refers to the invisible clouds of something that seem to swaddle the galaxies, and to provide the scaffolding for the structure and evolution of the visible universe. In the early ’90s, when the movie is set, the existence and extent and nature of this dark stuff were the hottest questions in cosmology, and the arguments, jargon and even the graphs brandished by the movie’s protagonists seem ripped from popular science writing of the time.
But the movie isn’t really about science.
As Mr. Chen, the director, said, “It’s about power, in a way.” That would be the nearly feudalistic power that a graduate adviser has over his student, who after 16 or more years sitting in a classroom listening and regurgitating information must now change gears and learn how to produce original research. That grueling process has been the crucible in which new scientists are made ever since Plato mentored Aristotle, and although it rarely leads to murder [adjoining article], it can often lead to disaffection, strife and lifelong feuds.
“The film did a really good job of capturing the atmosphere of a research lab,” Dr. Greene said.
“Graduate students are like apprentices,” said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. “It’s from another era. It’s something we don’t do well anymore, hand-crafted training.”
Advisers, he noted, write recommendations, decide when it is time for a student to defend his or her thesis and divvy up credit for the work that gets done together. Astronomers still argue about whether Jocelyn Burnell-Bell, who discovered the first pulsar while a graduate student at Cambridge University in England, should have shared in the subsequent Nobel Prize given to her adviser, Antony Hewish.
Janet D. Stemwedel, a philosopher at San Jose State University, recently wrote on her blog, doctorfreeride.blogspot.com, “It’s hard to understand just how powerless you can feel as a graduate student unless you have been a graduate student.”
Dr. Turner said: “The bond between student and adviser is almost like getting married. You’re going to be working and interacting with this person the rest of your life.”
As the movie makes clear, the passage from student to junior colleague is only heightened in ambiguity and tension when you are thousands of miles from home and hardly speak the language.
James Dickerson, a physicist at Vanderbilt University who leads a committee on minorities in physics for the American Physical Society, said Asian students were often marginalized because of a perception, which he called “unstated racism,” that they are exceptionally smart and are there to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As a result they wind up as cogs in the research machine and remain isolated from the rest of the community and the culture.
“It’s something not widely discussed in the physics community,” Dr. Dickerson said.
Shing-Tung Yau, a Harvard mathematics professor and mentor of many young mathematicians, said China’s one-child policy has added to the pressure on students.
“The Chinese family in general has high expectation on their children,” he said in an e-mail message. “When they realize that they cannot achieve it, they get very upset, especially the whole family have been telling their friends about him or her.”
“They also compete among themselves severely,” Dr. Yau added. “I observed that within my students.”
Dr. Lu, the Iowa gunman, was part of a wave of Chinese students recruited to come to Iowa to study plasma physics in the 1980s, when China was opening up to the West again after the Cultural Revolution.
Gerald Payne, a physics professor at Iowa then and now, said: “The selection process was very rigorous. We had exceptional students from China.”
By all accounts, however, Dr. Lu was troubled. Dr. Payne described him as very competitive and a loner, not good at socializing or expressing himself. He had isolated himself from other Chinese students and was living alone.
Mr. Chen, the director, said that he had met Dr. Lu’s sister in Beijing and that she had described him as someone who knew how to get good grades and go to the top, but who had “no living skill.”
Dr. Lu got his doctorate in the spring of 1991, but he failed to win the university’s $2,500 Spriesterbach Prize. The university gave it instead to his former roommate and perceived rival, Linhua Shan, and Dr. Lu complained to university officials.
Dr. Payne said that Dr. Lu’s adviser, Christoph K. Goertz, and the physics chairman, Dwight R. Nicholson, both of whom were killed, along with Dr. Shan, had been trying to help him, and had written him strong letters of recommendation for his job search. “People were addressing the issue; he was just being unrealistic in his demands,” he said. “His adviser was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. It was really sad.”
Mr. Chen, who is best known for directing operas, was a graduate student at New York University at the time. He recalled being puzzled by the shootings and the response. One Chinese language newspaper, he said, ran a front-page apology for the shootings, in language its intended recipients couldn’t read. At the same time he saw a screen saver from a Chinese student association that read “Long live Gang Lu.”
He said: “They held him as a hero. That really shocked me.”
The story resonated with Mr. Chen’s own experiences and that of friends who came to the United States with huge expectations and found themselves lost or on the wrong end of a power struggle with their mentors, and who either went back home or, in the case of one good friend, simply disappeared.
He said: “A lot of people came in late ’80s. They never found a balance between the idea of America and the America they experienced.”
The resulting movie is part autobiographical and deliberately steers away from a direct replication of Gang Lu’s story, partly out of respect for the families of the victims. One small change was to switch the action from plasma physics to cosmology, a jazzier subject whose abiding theme, dark matter, had a plethora of metaphorical meanings to Mr. Chen, among them a difference between East and West.
“In Chinese culture,” he explained, “the most profound world is intangible and invisible. Here, everything has to be proven, material.”
A more significant change was in the character of the protagonist. The character Liu Xing seems sunnier and more connected to the people around him, even to the extent of courting a local waitress, than the moody and isolated Gang Lu. Much of the onus of being the bad guy shifts to the adviser, who takes advantage of his student and then betrays him.
The ending is abrupt and, indeed, dark. A review on Variety magazine’s Web site complained that the violence came with little foreshadowing.
Indeed, Dr. Greene said that some of the Sundance judges thought the movie worked fine without the ending. “We don’t want to put out the idea that homicidal graduate students are a dime a dozen,” he said.
Mr. Chen said he wanted to tell the story of Liu Xing’s disillusionment without pointing a finger at who did what. Dr. Payne said Iowans worried that the movie would be taken as literal truth, leaving the impression that professors there had taken advantage of their graduate students. “I don’t see that perception in my graduate students,” he said. “When they come back they have good memories.”
“When these things happen, people always look for a reason,” he said, but added that Iowa had always treated its graduate students well, as colleagues and not indentured servants.
Nevertheless, he said, the university has tried to have more frequent and more regular get-togethers, like pizza parties and meetings. “Some of those things you should be doing anyway; it’s just part of a good education,” Dr. Payne said. “Some of that is a result of the shootings.”
“We didn’t ignore the shootings,” he said. “You get past those things, but you don’t forget them.”
Basic Instincts: Cutting Back Without Deprivation
By M. P. DUNLEAVEY, The New York Times, February 24, 2007
It sounds like something that would happen in San Francisco. In 2005, a few friends gathered for dinner and started bemoaning the fate of the planet, the environmental impact of consumer excess — and ended up challenging one another to not buy anything new for six months.
By mid-2006, the rapidly growing group was featured on the “Today” show, and people were calling it a movement.
“We think of it as more of a phenomenon than a movement,” said John Perry, a co-founder of the group, now known as the Compact. “We’re grateful for our 17 minutes of fame,” he added, “but we didn’t intend this to be broadcast. We didn’t mean to attract followers.”
Yet for such a simple and not terribly sexy idea — to buy nothing new, other than food and other absolute essentials — the Compact has managed to build a groundswell of supporters. The group has more than doubled since the fall, to nearly 8,000 members from 3,000. It has even found a footing in Europe and Australia.
If Thoreau comes to mind, Mr. Perry would be the first to agree that “there is nothing new or startling” about the Compact. The main difference between the Compact and other organizations with an antimaterialism bent, like Voluntary Simplicity, he said, is that the aim of the Compact is not just to scale back financially but to reduce the environmental toll of the American consumer lifestyle.
Compact members reuse or recycle what they have and buy only used or secondhand goods — except for food, health-related items and personal things, like socks and underwear. You can spend as much as you like on life’s more intangible pleasures, like travel, sports, music and other cultural activities.
Although the group took its name from the Mayflower Compact of 1620, it is not as Puritan as it sounds. As Marlaina Abbott-Ross, a Compact member who runs a small advertising agency in Charleston, S.C., put it: “It’s about mindful consumerism, not about depriving ourselves.”
When Mrs. Abbott-Ross first joined the Compact about a year ago, she was a nonstop shopper.
Packages would arrive from eBay and she wouldn’t remember what she had ordered. “I was starting to feel overwhelmed: by the clutter, by the credit card bills, by all this stuff we didn’t need.”
Now, she says, “I don’t even think about spending.” The result is not only an extra cushion of cash, “it’s a huge stress reducer,” she said. “Now I can buy what I want, whether it’s a nice bottle of wine or organic food for my family.”
To the extent that the Compact has any structure at all, it exists on Yahoo Groups (groups.yahoo.com/group/thecompact) where people can join threaded discussions about things like the temptations of Costco or whether your friends look at you askance (which many do, members report).
Mr. Perry monitors the group and has read thousands of statements about people’s reasons for joining. “I think we’ve touched a bundle of angry nerves,” he said. “People are worn out and hung over by all the stuff in their lives. Many have terrible consumer debt. They feel out of control.”
What may contribute to the Compact’s success, Mr. Perry thinks, is that it gives people a place to talk. “You can’t go to a cocktail party and say, ‘Hey, I’m $30,000 in debt, and I’m addicted to The Shopping Channel.’ ”
WHILE the chance to let your hair down financially may provide some relief, the Compact offers a surprising payoff. Yes, the group’s secondhand-buying strategy has helped members to save money, pay off their credit card debts and pad their children’s college funds. And it gives people the satisfaction of knowing they are contributing less to the local landfill.
The much bigger dividend gained by many members is time.
“When you don’t go to stores, you spend a lot more time doing other things,” said Mr. Perry, who has traded his own “recreational shopping habit” for a plot in the community garden, eating out with friends and volunteering at his son’s school.
Bridget Stuart, a real estate agent in Laguna Beach, Calif., who joined the Compact in December, experienced a similar windfall of time. Now she invites friends over for dinner and to play board games and takes walks with her children in lieu of cruising the mall.
“I’m even getting back into tennis,” she said. “I used to play tennis all the time, and the biggest thing that supplanted it was shopping. That’s crazy. I actually feel like this is getting me back to the way I want to live.”
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Date: 2007-03-27 04:54 pm (UTC)