Recent changes to labor laws are transforming the home-based care landscape, requiring leaders to stay vigilant in order to sustain and grow their businesses.

From changing independent contractor classifications to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) enforcement, legal experts caution that changing regulations can create costly pitfalls for at-home care providers.

In recent years, home care has seen an increase in union efforts nationwide. Still, even providers that do not have a unionized workforce are subject to the National Labor Relations Act.

“All employees, regardless of whether they’re unionized or not, have something called Section 7 rights, which can be very dangerous for employers, especially non-unionized, because you don’t usually think of the NLRA is something we need to worry about,” Aimee Delaney, a partner at law firm Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP, said last month during a presentation at the HCAOA Illinois Chapter Conference. “But that protects our employees’ right to engage in protected concerted activity for the purposes of discussing, organizing, unionizing on the terms or conditions of employment.”

Section 7 allows employees to come together, even on social media, and discuss topics like company wages. This means providers should be aware that, in some cases, firing employees can leave them in legal hot water.

“You should be talking to your lawyer before you actually fire somebody, so you know if you’re safe to fire them, or whether you’re going to have a Section 7 issue,” Delaney said.

When President Donald Trump first took office at the start of the year, he terminated a slew of positions at the National Labor Relations Board. Delaney warns home-based care leaders that, despite this shake-up, employees can still file charges.

“This does not mean that your employees can’t file charges, or that any sort of regional processing and normal workings of the NLRB aren’t happening,” she said. “It does mean we will not be able to have any official rulemaking guidance coming out of the NLRB until they are back up to a sufficient number of board members to have a quorum.”

Home-based care leaders may also see some rollback of Biden-era labor laws regarding independent contractors.

Under the Biden administration, the Department of Labor issued a new rule outlining the criteria for determining what qualifies as an independent contractor.

“We don’t ever want to find ourselves in a misclassification situation where we’re treating somebody who really is an employee for us as an independent contractor — we’re not withholding payroll taxes, we’re also not paying overtime that can get us into a heap of trouble,” Delaney said.

Another area where Delaney believes there may be rollbacks is OSHA enforcement, which expanded under the Biden administration.

At the end of June, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) began the process to reinstate the companionship exemption. The proposal has received both praise and criticism from the industry and its advocates.

Delaney noted that it’s very likely that the proposal will move forward.

“The fact that the DOL has proposed a new rule to bring us back to the exemptions and that they’ve issued this enforcement guidance to their regional enforcement offices, saying, do not enforce this provision is a pretty significant change,” she said.