Monday, September 05, 2011

California to Regulate 2-hour Babysitter Shifts

Regulation in this country is out of control. Anyone who has met with 'regulators' knows how incredibly ignorant they are about what they are trying to manage, as when a boss 4 levels above you comes in and tries to make your daily tasks more efficient. They are often good people, just doing their job, but it's rather pitiful watching them come in, you explain what you do, and they make some silly reporting requirements. The latest turns the regulator knob to 11:
Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers’ compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck.

8 comments:

Todd said...

I'm not finding the offensive provisions in the most recent version of the bill.
http://tinyurl.com/3dpbnua
Where's the reference?

Mr. Nosuch said...

Yeah, this is one of those "the story is so good, it doesn't matter if it's true" kind of things.

Take a look at the bill. It's not long. I can't find anything like this even in the original bill.

The closest I can find is:

" 1461. (a) Every domestic work employer shall authorize and permit all domestic work employees to take rest periods, which, insofar as practicable, shall be in the middle of each work period. The authorized rest period time shall be based on the total hours worked daily at the rate of 10 minutes net rest time per four hours, or major fraction thereof, of work. However, a rest period need not be
authorized for domestic work employees whose total daily work time is less than three and one-half hours. Authorized rest period time shall be counted as hours worked for which there shall be no
deduction from wages.
(b) If a domestic work employer fails to provide a domestic work employee a rest period in accordance with the applicable provisions of this order, the domestic work employer shall pay the domestic work
employee one additional hour of pay at the employee's regular rate of compensation for each work day that the rest period is not provided."

So adhering to the letter of the proposed law, one break every four hours, technically, or you need pay for an extra hour.

One can argue if this is over regulation, but it's good to argue over the real aspects of the bill, instead of an even more outrageous version that isn't there.

Martin said...

Eric, please don't post too many of these fairy-tale stories forwarded from Fox News without checking them.

I subscribe to your blog for your rigorous analysis of security returns, not for your forwarding-without-analysis of far-right political propaganda.

If the signal-to-noise ratio worsens more, you'll lose me as a reader (and many others, I guess).

Eric Falkenstein said...

Well, Slate, which is pretty left-wing, agrees with me. The key is these things weren't mentioned explicitly, but are implied by the application of existing law for household domestic servants. See Slate here. ABC news also takes no issue with Doug LaMalfa's interpretation (that's who I quoted).

Even if the break policy is 4 hours and 10 minutes, not 2 and 15, it's an insane over rearch that will be ignored, making every parent a criminal, useful for governmental extortion at a later date (if everyone's guilty, you have to be really nice to government).

The bill has 18 pages, and refers to other codes, so only a labor lawyer in this field really knows what is required. However, the robo-signing controversy highlights that stupid laws that damage no one can be used with great effect at a later date if needed. That is, no one subject to robosigning actually was not in default, so the fact that some back office person didn't verify he saw the title was irrelevant, and treated that way for decades, until it was useful in muckraking.

J said...

Babysitting is a personal service business, like a dentist, an attorney or an investment adviser. We all know what happens when unlicenced practitioners sell investment advise. The babysitting profession must be regulated and licenced, and only those who undergo training and pass supervised exams should be allowed to practice it. The media silences the hair rising stories of pirate babysitters feeding fattening pizza and sugared beverages to their charges. MORE regulation is imperative. And taxing.

JoshK said...

I think the bill asks for workers' comp for baby sitters as well.

JoshK said...

And weren't unregulated baby sitters a big part of the financial crises as well? Wouldn't we not be where we are now if we would have had a few baby sitting regulations in place?

Patrick R. Sullivan said...

First, they came for the lemonade stand operators, and I said nothing, because I wasn't a lemonade stand operator....