Punching In: California Fills Wage Protection Hole Left by DOL

Monday morning musings for workplace watchers

Golden State Home Health | AI-backed Federal Workers

Rebecca Rainey: California clapped back at the Trump administration’s effort to end overtime and minimum wage protections for certain home health aide workers.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed into law last week a bill that enshrines overtime pay requirements for live-in domestic workers and direct care workers that assist elderly or disabled people.

A United Domestic Workers local based in California said the new law will establish a state right to overtime pay for 770,000 home health providers in the state.

“Members of our union fought hard to gain overtime pay and we weren’t about to let Trump take it away—particularly because domestic workers have been historically excluded from labor protections,” said Doug Moore, Executive Director of United Domestic Workers.

California’s move to ensure at-home health care workers have state-level overtime protections comes as the DOL has stopped enforcing minimum wage rules for these workers at the federal level.

President Donald Trump’s administration has proposed scrapping a 2013 Obama-era rule that scaled back an exemption from minimum wage and overtime requirements for live-in workers providing “companionship services” for elderly or disabled people.

That rule reduced the types of work that exempted health aide workers could provide without being paid full wages to only 20% of their workweek. It also barred third party contractors, like home care agencies from using the exemption.

The DOL says tossing the rule could lower costs for these at-home companionship services and “significantly reduce regulatory burden for the consumers and providers.”

The home care pay issue is being closely watched by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which organized a campaign to get its members to submit comments opposing the Trump administration rule. While its unclear if the UDW’s push for the protections in California will be emulated in other areas, at least 29 states don’t have any local overtime or minimum wage protections for home health care workers.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a news conference.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Ian Kullgren: The government is testing how artificial intelligence can make federal workers more efficient—and help them avoid some of the biases cooked into AI models.

Punching In caught up with David Shive, the General Services Administration’s chief information officer, to discuss how the agency is using its new AI test tool in the month since it launched.

The tool, USAi, allows agencies to experiment with several models—OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft for example—to simplify day-to-day “drudgery” for federal workers.

“For example, we have business processes that are 20, 30 years old. We’re the government—we’re no different than any large enterprise,” Shive told PI at a FedScoop conference in downtown Washington, where dozens of officials gathered to discuss all aspects AI. “Employees will have to go from system A to system B to system C to work the process through its entire life cycle.”

The more steps you have in a process, Shive said, the more likely it is that the user will get derailed and not complete the task. AI helps them focus on the end goal and move fluidly from system to system.

The technology can also help discern which models might have biases for certain tasks, an aspect of the emerging technology that has increasingly come under scrutiny. Elon Musk’s X in July deleted posts from its in-house AI model, Grok, after it praised Adolf Hitler and made other antisemitic comments.

Bias can occur in subtler ways, starting with the way data is collected and labeled, according to Chapman University’s AI hub. For example, if the data used to train an AI model is skewed, the results will also be flawed. The USAi tool lets agencies compare models’ responses to the same questions, allowing them to screen for bias.

USAi is built to protect sensitive government data, giving tech officers across agencies “full, unfettered, and complete control” in a closed system, Shive said.

The effort comes as the Trump administration pushes the adoption of AI to make government more efficient and detect waste.

Trump last week rolled out a plan to accelerate AI development, a mission he likened to the space race in the 1960s. DOGE recently adopted an AI-driven goal to repeal more than 100,000 regulations by Jan. 20, 2026, though independent experts doubt whether it’s realistic.