Au Pair Sponsor Agencies Settle Wage Lawsuit, Offer $65.5 Million In Back Pay
Attorneys, from left, David Seligman, Nina DiSalvo and Alexander Hood of Denver’s Towards Justice, which filed a lawsuit on behalf of au pairs for higher pay.
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David Zalubowski/AP
Underpaid au pairs who have worked in homes across America, taking care of children, often cooking, cleaning, playing chauffeur and providing a range of other duties, will finally receive back pay they say they are owed.
On Wednesday, 15 of the companies authorized by the State Department to recruit young foreigners to provide low-cost child care in U.S. households reached a $65.5 million settlement in a class-action law suit filed by nearly a dozen au pairs in a Denver federal court.
About 100,000 former au pairs who worked in the U.S. between 2009 and 2018 are covered under the deal, which still needs to be approved by the court.
The lawsuit alleged sponsor agencies kept wages artificially low and denied the workers overtime pay. The case was scheduled to proceed to trial on Feb. 25.
“Our argument was that they colluded together to keep their wages well below state and federal minimum wages, and [prospective au pairs] were being told by sponsor agencies that the wages were set and that there was no room to negotiate,” Peter Skinner, a partner with Boies Schiller Flexner, which represented the au pairs, told NPR.
In reality, he continued, “Au pairs have always had the ability to negotiate their salaries under the existing regulations but they were being given incorrect information.”
“We’re pleased that our years of hard work will bring justice to so many young child care workers and fundamentally change the way the au pair industry operates,” Skinner added.
In addition to the monetary compensation, the settlement included a requirement for all companies to provide future au pairs adequate information about their rights under U.S. laws.
David Seligman, director of Denver-based Towards Justice, the advocacy group that filed the lawsuit in 2014, added in a statement: “This settlement, the hard-fought victory of our clients who fought for years on behalf of about 100,000 fellow au pairs, will be perhaps the largest settlement ever on behalf of minimum wage workers and will finally give au pairs the opportunity to seek higher wages and better working conditions.”
According to the lawsuit, agencies falsely claimed that the government set their maximum weekly wage at $195.75 for a 45-hour work week, which breaks down to $4.35 per hour. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.
Sponsor agencies have consistently denied the accusations arguing that they follow the State Department’s guidelines which allow families to deduct 40 percent of an au pair’s salary to cover room and board, which they are required to provide. That is how most families arrive at the $195.75 pay check as opposed to $344.38 for 45 hours per week.
“There’s always been one nationwide stipend,” Michael McCarry, director of the Alliance for International Educational and Cultural Exchange, an industry group that represents many of the sponsors, told the Denver Post in 2016.
“[The State Department] has never raised the issue with us about state minimum wage laws,” McCarry noted.
Au pairs are authorized to live and work in the U.S. under the State Department’s J-1 visa program. It was established in 1986 and is described as a cultural exchange, giving participants the opportunity to study, improve their English and learn about the United States. But critics of the program, who say it fosters underpaid labor and that it is rife with abuse, have long argued that it should be administered by the Department of Labor.
“They certainly would do a better job than the Department of State, which doesn’t have experience vetting host families and making sure that abusive host families don’t remain within the program,” Elizabeth Mauldin, policy director at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, told NPR’s Here & Now.
Skinner noted it will likely take several months to track down about 100,000 au pairs who worked in the U.S. over the nine years covered by the law suit.
And although, the settlement did not resolve the central disputes over an appropriate minimum wage for the caregivers or establish the scope of their responsibilities, Skinner said he is confident sponsor agencies will increase their salary guidelines and reevaluate recruitment efforts.
“I am optimistic that they will see it makes economic sense to offer higher wages that attract better skilled au pairs,” Skinner said.
Bernice Sandler, 'Godmother' Of Title IX, Dies At 90
Bernice Sandler, who had a major hand in creating and helping pass Title IX legislation, has died at 90. The landmark federal civil rights law ensures gender equality in education and athletics.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
We’re going to take the next few minutes to remember the woman being called the godmother of Title IX. Bernice Sandler died this past weekend at the age of 90. She was the catalyst for the landmark civil rights legislation that made it illegal for schools receiving federal funds to discriminate on the basis of sex. NPR’s Tom Goldman reports.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Title IX was passed in 1972, but the seed for that momentous law was planted about 40 years earlier in an elementary school in Brooklyn. That’s when young Bernice Sandler was offended by the way the boys got to do all the classroom activities.
MARTY LANGELAN: For example, running a slide projector.
GOLDMAN: Marty Langelan was Sandler’s friend and colleague for nearly 50 years.
LANGELAN: You know, I mean, simple everyday things. You know, oh, we’ll have the boys do this. If it was important, the boys did it. And she told her mother back then when she was a schoolgirl that she was going to change the world, that this was wrong. And, boy, she sure did.
GOLDMAN: But not until the late 1960s. Sandler was teaching part time at the University of Maryland and was told she wouldn’t be considered for a full-time position because she came on too strong for a woman. Langelan says Sandler decided this had to be illegal. But back then, discrimination in education was rampant – departments refusing to hire women, grad programs denying admission to women, scholarships for men only. Sandler was a meticulous person, and so she started doing research and found presidential Executive Order 11246. It prohibited federal contractors from discriminating in employment on the basis of race and nationality.
LANGELAN: And then she found a footnote that said it had been amended by President Johnson in 1968 to include discrimination based on sex. She literally yelled, eureka, eureka – because most colleges had federal contracts.
GOLDMAN: Over the next two years, Sandler filed around 250 complaints demanding the government enforce its regulations. This led to dramatic congressional hearings and, ultimately, the signing by President Richard Nixon of Title IX. The law’s initial focus was on academic hiring and admissions, but Title IX’s impact spread to all areas of discrimination – to sexual harassment on campus, and its most visible manifestation, sports. I interviewed Sandler in 2012, and she laughed about how she never really thought about causing a sea change in athletics.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
BERNICE SANDLER: And I remember saying, isn’t this great news? On field day or play day, that’s a day when schools cancel classes and they have athletic relays and games and stuff while outside. And I’m saying, on field day, there’s gonna be more activities for girls. Isn’t that nice?
GOLDMAN: Marty Langelan says when she first met Sandler in the early 1970s, she was struck by this little, tiny person who was incredibly cheerful. Langelan says she never saw Sandler angry at anyone, but she had moral anger about injustice. Langelan says, near the end of her life, Sandler recognized she’d lived up to her schoolgirl promise. Bernice Bunny Sandler leaves behind two daughters, three grandkids and countless girls and women in sports and academia forever indebted. Tom Goldman, NPR News.
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Democrats' Health Care Ambitions Meet The Reality Of Divided Government
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a speech Thursday to the new Congress that Democrats want “to lower health care costs and prescription drug prices and protect people with pre-existing medical conditions.”
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Carolyn Kaster/AP
In her first speech as speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi made it clear that she knows that health care is key to why voters sent Democrats to Congress.
“In the past two years the American people have spoken,” Pelosi told members of Congress and their families who were gathered Thursday in the House chamber for the opening day of the session.
“Tens of thousands of public events were held, hundreds of thousands of people turned out, millions of calls were made, countless families, even sick little children — our little lobbyists, our little lobbyists — bravely came forward to tell their stories and they made a big difference,” said Pelosi, a California Democrat.
What is the Democrats’ mandate?
“To lower health care costs and prescription drug prices and protect people with pre-existing medical conditions,” she said to applause.
In their campaigns last year, Democrats promised to protect the Affordable Care Act, and the access to coverage that it guarantees for many people. Many Democrats went further, running on the promise of “Medicare-for-all.”
But now that Democrats control the House, their ambitions are meeting up with reality.
With the Senate in Republican hands and President Trump having promised to repeal the ACA, Democrats’ ability to make sweeping health policy changes is limited.
Instead, they’ll likely rely on hearings and turn to the courts to try to influence health policy and shore up the ACA.
Pelosi started on Day 1.
Just hours after her speech, House Democrats voted to intervene in a lawsuit in an effort to protect the Affordable Care Act. The House will join several state attorneys general in appealing the ruling of a federal district judge in Texas that the law is unconstitutional.
And Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., head of the Energy and Commerce Committee, announced a hearing on the impact of the ruling. He said he intends to hold lots of hearings to review the Trump administration’s actions around the ACA — actions he calls “sabotage.”
“At a time when the Trump administration is doing all the sabotage of the ACA, I think the focus really has to be on trying to prevent the sabotage and making sure the ACA is strengthened,” he said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office.
That “sabotage” includes Trump’s decision to stop reimbursing insurance companies for discounts they’re required by law to give to their lowest-income clients, Pallone said.
He also cited a Department of Health and Human Services rule change that allows insurance policies that don’t carry the full benefits required by the ACA to be renewed for up to three years. In the past, those plans were intended to serve as a bridge for someone between jobs and were limited to just a few months
Pallone said these and other changes may violate the law.
“I think if you do some good oversight and find out what the sabotage consists of, then you can say, ‘Well this isn’t allowed under the law,’ ” Pallone said. “And then you either take it to court or try to get legislation passed.”
Oversight is a powerful tool, said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, a former HHS official who is now a managing director at Manatt Health Strategies, a lobbying firm.
“I don’t think we should underestimate how important that is, when decisions that are being made are questioned and officials have to defend them,” she said.
For the past two years, the focus in Washington has been on repealing or dismantling the Affordable Care Act. That’s about to change, she said.
“That energy can now shift to examining what the administration is doing and putting forth other ideas and other proposals, some of which might generate bipartisan agreement,” she said.
Pallone is hopeful that Republicans may support some measure to shore up the ACA. In the last Congress, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., proposed bills that would restore those payments to insurers, and he backed a plan to create a reinsurance program that could help reduce premiums.
Pallone acknowledged Democrats’ plans are much less ambitious than the “Medicare-for-all” proposals that many of his colleagues touted during their campaigns.
“I just think it’s unlikely that we could ever pass it,” he said. “So I don’t want to prioritize that.”
