Posted on August 1st, 2019
Below is a complete transcript of this video.
What’s up fellow entrepreneurs? It’s John Fagerholm again. Normally, my videos are something relating to entrepreneurs, but today’s video is going to be for everybody.
Today, I want to talk about live-in domestic care.
We’re seeing a lot of problems with the domestic live-in care and basically, it’s because of the sleep time.
So according to California law, if you have live-in domestic care, then they have to be completely off the clock during the sleep times or it’s considered overtime.
Now there are some exceptions to that which are too much to get into. But the basic rule is that if they have to wake up in the middle of the night, or do anything else like that, then you have to pay them for that time.
And if the interruptions are so frequent that they can’t get reasonable sleep, then you have to pay them for the entire time.
So I’m seeing a lot of cases now where these live-in domestic workers are either actually having to get up and not getting paid the overtime because typically people just don’t know any better, and they paid them a very specific salary just to live-in and to do everything including free rent and food.
But that just doesn’t work. And then in the worst case scenarios, they do get their sleep, but because nobody’s tracking it, they say that they don’t. And then you’ve got to pay.
So the reason why this is for everybody is because I’m seeing this as a problem for companies that staff but also for individuals.
There are several cases that I’m getting where you have elderly parents that have live-in care, but the live-in care was set up by the adult children. So now the law says that the children, because they’re the ones controlling everything are the employers. So they end up getting hit for all of the penalties and everything else too.
My recommendation is that if you can absolutely avoid it, don’t have live-in. And if you can’t avoid it, then have a written agreement that they have this number of hours of sleep time, and it’s from one particular hour to another particular hour, and eight hours is probably a good rule of thumb.
And then if they are required to get up in the middle of the night for something, then have them log that, and make that a policy and then pay them the overtime for it.
That’s the only way you’re going to get out of getting hit with huge penalties and fines.
Yeah, so I think that’s it for today, until next time.
