$9.61 an Hour

[Content Note: Worker exploitation; class warfare.]

$9.61 an hour: That's the average wage of the United States' nearly 2 million home healthcare aides—people doing some of the most difficult and necessary work for an aging population.

While average wages are on paper above the federal floor of $7.25 an hour, "there are all sorts of reasons why in practice it actually falls below minimum wage," Abby Marquand, the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute's director of policy research, said. Like [Atlanta home care worker Kimberly Weems], many are not paid for overtime or travel time. "You're paid barely above minimum wage just for the hours you're actually there with a client." Unpredictable and part-time hours reduce average pay even more, so that median annual earnings for a home health aide are just $13,000 a year.

...That leaves many of them living in poverty. A quarter of home care workers and their families live below the federal poverty line, or $24,250 a year for a family of four. More than half earn below 200 percent of the poverty line. Home care workers' wages aren't enough to support a family of two in most states.

...The people doing this work are also an especially vulnerable group. Nearly 90 percent are women and more than half are people of color, while one in four is an immigrant. The issue of low pay is "a civil rights issue, this is an economic justice issue," Marquand said.

This is an absolute scandal—or should be, but isn't, because our particular capitalist system is built on the damnable lie that everyone earns what they deserve. And the backbreaking, exhausting, emotionally draining work of being a home healthcare aide isn't considered "hard work"—all the mirthless laughter in the universe—deserving of commensurate compensation to the difficult labor it actually is, because it's primarily done by women of color, many of whom made the terrible decision to be born outside of the country to whose privileged citizens they provide crucial care.

Our priorities are shit.