No, Living at Work Didn’t Erase Caregivers’ Wage Protections.

The Facts

Caregiving at AssureCare did not divide neatly into work time and home time. Jocylin Bolina, Adolfo Payag, Madonna Ocampo, Honorina Robles, Hollee Castillo and Reginald Villalobos lived in adult family homes owned and operated by Marcelina and Gerald Macandog. Residents had physical or cognitive limitations and needed different levels of assistance.

The caregivers helped residents bathe, dress, eat, use the toilet and walk. They cooked, cleaned, did laundry and maintenance, bought groceries, drove residents to appointments and handled administrative work. At night, a caregiver generally made rounds to check residents, help them use the bathroom and reposition them to prevent injuries.

Room and board came with the job. The workers did not pay for rent, utilities, internet or food, and they had access to a vehicle. Family members and significant others could also live in the homes without paying household expenses. AssureCare relied on those benefits in defending the arrangement.

The pay did not change with the hours worked. The majority also said AssureCare kept no employment documents recording meal periods, rest breaks, sick leave or other personal leave.

How Residency Became a Labor Rule

Washington’s Minimum Wage Act establishes basic employment standards, including minimum wages and overtime. The former statutory provision at issue exempted workers who lived where they worked. AssureCare argued that this reflected the practical difficulty of separating personal time from work time in a shared residence.

The distinction mattered because AssureCare employed both live-in and non-live-in caregivers. According to the concurrence, both groups performed the same resident-care work. Shift workers remained protected by the wage law; live-in workers did not.

What the Arrangement Meant for the Caregivers

The practical consequence was not simply a different payroll calculation. The majority described workers who were expected to respond to residents during the day or night, whose meal and rest periods were often interrupted and who routinely lacked meaningful opportunities for uninterrupted sleep.

“I slept on a recliner or the floor in the common area of the home.” Declaration of caregiver Adolfo Payag, quoted by the majority

Honorina Robles said her sleeping area was a recliner in a television room. She placed cardboard in the sliding glass door so people outside could not see her sleeping. Those descriptions undercut the idea that room and board necessarily functioned as an adequate substitute for enforceable workplace protections.

The concurrence supplied a fuller account of the declarations. Caregivers attributed insomnia, headaches, blurred vision, stomachaches, mental-health problems and constant fatigue to repeated sleep disruption. They also described back, shoulder and knee injuries from moving residents, exposure to blood and other bodily fluids, needle pricks, infectious illnesses and physical attacks from confused or upset residents.

The majority did not rely on every detail cataloged by the concurrence. It did conclude that the evidence demonstrated significant musculoskeletal risk, physically injurious work, long hours and routine sleep deprivation. That was enough for the court to classify live-in caregiving in adult family homes as dangerous work under Washington’s constitution.

The Evidence—and the Dispute Over It

The central factual disagreement was not whether caregiving could be difficult. It was whether the record was specific and developed enough to establish that live-in caregiving at adult family homes qualified for special constitutional protection.

What the Court Actually Decided

Washington’s privileges and immunities clause prohibits the state from granting a privilege or immunity to one class on terms unavailable to others. When a law implicates a fundamental right of state citizenship, courts ask whether it grants such a benefit and, if so, whether reasonable grounds support the distinction.

The majority’s reasoning proceeded in three steps.

The court carefully limited the right it recognized. It did not say every worker has a constitutional right to the Minimum Wage Act itself. It held that the constitution requires statutory protection for workers in dangerous or unhealthy occupations and that, on this record, the Minimum Wage Act supplied the applicable safeguards.

The ruling affirmed partial summary judgment. It was not a final determination of all wage liability, and it did not invalidate the exemption in every occupation or every factual setting.

The Dissent’s Warning

Justice Johnson agreed that the caregivers raised legitimate workplace concerns but argued that the majority had acted on an underdeveloped record. The studies addressed nursing homes, assisted-living settings and broad worker classifications rather than isolating live-in caregivers at adult family homes.

The dissent also challenged the majority’s statement that the Minimum Wage Act was the only applicable worker-protection framework. It pointed to the Washington Industrial Safety and Health Act, which requires employers to provide a workplace free from recognized hazards and does not exempt live-in workers.

In Johnson’s view, AssureCare’s evidence created enough factual doubt to defeat summary judgment. A trial court should have developed a more specific record before declaring the exemption unconstitutional, he wrote, particularly because the majority’s reasoning could affect challenges to other statutory exemptions.

The History the Majority Did Not Decide

The caregivers argued that domestic-worker exclusions were rooted in the historic denial of federal labor protections to Black workers, women and other marginalized groups. The majority acknowledged what it called a “disturbing history of racism and sexism” in domestic and agricultural labor exclusions.

It did not find that discriminatory intent caused Washington’s live-in exemption. The court said it did not need to decide that issue because the exemption already failed the privileges-and-immunities analysis. The caregivers’ separate equal-protection claim remains before the trial court.

Justice Mungia’s concurrence went further, arguing that the exclusion continued to burden a home-care workforce in which people of color, women and immigrants are overrepresented. That analysis was part of the concurrence, not the majority’s holding.

What Remains Unresolved

The largest immediate question is whether the constitutional decision applies only going forward or also reaches earlier work. AssureCare asked the Supreme Court for prospective application. The court declined to decide because the trial judge had not ruled on the issue and the question concerns the scope of the remedy rather than the exemption’s constitutionality.

The opinion also did not calculate unpaid wages, determine damages or resolve the caregivers’ remaining claims. Those matters return to the trial court. Nor did the record establish how many adult family homes use comparable live-in arrangements or quantify the industrywide cost of complying with the wage law. AssureCare warned of destabilization, but the court did not make a finding about the scale of that risk.

What a Legitimate Fix Looks Like

Any durable response has to address the failure the court identified: residency cannot serve as a substitute for enforceable labor safeguards. That means recording actual work time, accounting for interrupted sleep and breaks, and staffing homes so resident coverage does not depend on treating a caregiver’s presence as unlimited availability.

Room and board may remain valuable to workers, residents and employers. Under the court’s reasoning, however, those benefits cannot by themselves justify removing wage and safety protections from people performing dangerous work. The details of compliance and any remedy remain for the trial court, lawmakers and regulated employers; the Supreme Court did not prescribe a staffing model.

What to Watch

The constitutional question has been answered only as applied to live-in caregivers at adult family homes. The unanswered question is what that answer will require AssureCare to pay or change for work performed under the former exemption.