Advocates for seniors say elderly people receiving in-home care should be exempt from a Montgomery County plan that would require written contracts between domestic workers and their employers.
Last Thursday, Montgomery County Council’s public safety committee endorsed the bill, which requires county residents who hire domestic help — like nannies or housekeepers — to sign written agreements specifying the terms and conditions of employment. Under the measure, employers also must give live-in domestic workers their own private bedroom with a locked door, and reasonable access to a kitchen, bathroom and laundry facility.
Irwin Goldbloom, chairman of the Montgomery Commission on Aging, sent a letter requesting the potential law not apply to those workers “who provide companionship and personal care services for the elderly.”
“It can be extremely difficult for economically disadvantaged seniors to obtain elder-care services for companionship and personal care,” Goldbloom wrote. “Because of the nature of this service, we believe it is less likely that the domestic worker providing companionship and/or personal care for the elderly would be subject to the abuses that this bill is designed to protect against.”
Public safety committee members endorsed the bill, and sent it to the full council, without excluding home care workers who cook for, clean for, bathe and buy groceries for the elderly.
Council Vice President Phil Andrews, who chairs the public safety committee, abstained from the vote because he may want it altered to reflect the Commission on Aging’s concerns.
“We heard from people with experience in the field that it could make it tougher to find people to do this work for seniors,” Andrews said. “If there’s a concern about abuse of domestic workers, it would seem to be less likely to occur in a situation like that.”
Councilman George Leventhal, who co-sponsored the measure with Councilman Marc Elrich, said he was not sure he agreed.
“To some extent you can argue that if an older person is losing some of their faculties they may be even more likely to unintentionally violate basic worker rights,” Leventhal said. “The employers might not mean to do it, they just forget that somebody has been working 10 days in a row without a break.”
