The field guide: domestic workers and caregivers

The work happens in a home, but the law follows you through the door: California wrote a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, and the wage orders reach the kitchen, the nursery, and the overnight shift.

Domestic work — caregiving, housekeeping, nannying — is the economy’s most isolated workplace: one worker, one household, no coworkers to compare notes with, and an employer who may sincerely believe labor law stops at a private front door. It does not. This guide is the comparing of notes.

1 · The Bill of Rights, and who it covers

The Domestic Worker Bill of Rights gives covered personal attendants time-and-a-half after nine hours in a day or forty-five in a week.¹ The classification is specific: a worker who spends more than twenty percent of working time on non-attendant duties is not a personal attendant. Non-live-in domestic workers who are not personal attendants generally receive the eight-hour daily and forty-hour weekly overtime rules. Live-in non-attendants have different state rules, including overtime after nine hours in a day and special sixth- and seventh-day rates.² Federal overtime protection must also be checked, especially for agency employment. Coverage exceptions exist for specified family, casual-babysitting, referral, and public-program arrangements. Cash payment does not itself remove protection.

2 · The live-in rules, where the violations concentrate

Living where you work is where hours melt. The law’s answer: a live-in worker’s unworked time is her own, and required presence is work. The night hours spent “available” for a client who wakes; the weekend you cannot leave because no relief was arranged; the 6 a.m. start that follows a 2 a.m. call — when the household’s needs control the time, the time is generally compensable, and the arithmetic of our meal-and-rest and hours-worked pieces applies inside a house exactly as it does inside a warehouse. The most common domestic-work case we see is, at bottom, one number: hours actually controlled versus hours actually paid, across years.

3 · The agency question

Many caregivers arrive through agencies or registries, and the joint-employment analysis from our staffing primer applies at full strength: who sets the schedule, who directs the care plan, who can end the placement. Households and agencies routinely each believe the other is the employer; the law is comfortable concluding both are. Keep every document with either name on it.

4 · Patterns to examine

Flat daily or weekly rates covering unbounded hours — a rate is lawful; the hours it silently absorbs are not. No overtime past the ninth hour for personal attendants. Overnight presence treated as free. Deductions for lodging and meals beyond what the wage orders permit, or for “breakage.” Missing pay records deserve attention, but Labor Code section 226(d) excludes specified household employment from its wage-statement requirements; the absence of a stub is not automatically a violation in every domestic-work arrangement. Keep your own record either way. And the terminations that follow a complaint or an injury, which our retaliation framework treats no differently because the workplace has a garden.

5 · Your paper trail

A daily log — start, end, night interruptions, in any notebook or phone app, in any language. Texts with the household or agency about schedules and duties: keep them all; they are the schedule. Whatever payment record exists — transfers, checks, envelopes noted by date. Photos of any written agreement. Isolation is the industry’s condition, but it has a legal silver lining: your contemporaneous record, kept in your own hand, is often the only systematic record of the household’s labor practices — which makes it powerful. Start with the contact page before sending documents. Confirm availability, the language of any consultation, fees, and cost responsibility before proceeding.

Notes

1. Lab. Code §§1450–1454.
2. IWC Wage Order 15.

Related writing: Sus derechos en el trabajo · Meal periods, rest breaks, and the hour of pay most workers never see · Two companies, one job

This article states California law as of its revision date and is analysis, not legal advice. Reading this site does not create an attorney-client relationship. Attorney advertising.