Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, DOL NEWS—Labor Secretary signals possible move away from 12-year-old regulation on home care workers pay, (Jun 11, 2025)

By Brandi O. Brown, J.D.

In a brief filed with the Sixth Circuit in a case initially brought by DOL against a home care agency, the Secretary stated that “the Department of Labor intends to reconsider these regulations.”

In 2021, the Secretary of the Department of Labor brought an enforcement action against Americare Healthcare Services, LLC, and an individual defendant, alleging they had willfully failed to pay their employees overtime compensation owed under the FLSA. Specifically, under a regulation promulgated in 2013, third-party employers such as Americare are prohibited from claiming exemptions from the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime pay requirements for certain domestic service employees.

In January, a federal district court in Ohio rejected the healthcare firm’s challenge to the 2013 rule barring third-party agencies from claiming the FLSA’s companionship and live-in exemptions, and found that the firm utilized an unlawful rate reduction practice to avoid paying the proper premium overtime rate. Granting the DOL’s motion for summary judgment, the court also found that the violations were willful and applied the three-year statute of limitations, awarded $7.5M in back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages, and allowed the DOL to seek additional damages if the employer produced records that showed a continuing violation (Department of Labor v. Americare Healthcare Services, LLC, No. 2:21-cv-5076 (S.D. Ohio Jan. 9, 2025)).

The defendants appealed, continuing to challenge the validity of the 2013 regulation in light of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. In a brief filed with the Sixth Circuit in late May by the new Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, while she continued to argue in favor of the position held by DOL in the lawsuit, she signaled in a footnote that the regulation may be coming under scrutiny in the future.

“As Congress intended.” The Secretary’s brief states of the 2013 regulation: “The regulation ensures that where, as here, home care workers are employed by third party agencies rather than solely by the recipients of care (or their families), the workers receive the same minimum wage and overtime protections as other professional domestic service employees—just as Congress intended.”

But may reconsider. Nevertheless, in a footnote, Chavez-DeRemer adds: “During the relevant time period, the regulations at issue in this case were in effect. However, the Department of Labor intends to reconsider these regulations, and may wish to pursue rulemaking in the future to take a different policy approach.” Reconsideration of regulations, of course, falls in line with President Trump’s push for deregulation.

Still, the brief ended with this conclusion: “In the wake of Loper Bright, these reasoned regulations remain within the bounds of the discretionary authority that Congress conferred on the Department to implement the exemptions in the 1974 domestic service amendments to the FLSA. Therefore, the Department requests that this Court affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment to the Department in its entirety.”

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