House Bill 1045<\/a>, also known as the Fair Wages in Health Care Act, would establish occupation-specific minimum wages for home care aides, direct support professionals, certified nursing assistants, psychiatric aides and licensed practical nurses.<\/p>\nIt would set the minimum pay at $18 an hour for home care aides and direct support professionals, $20 an hour for certified nursing assistants, $22 an hour for psychiatric aides, and $24 an hour for licensed practical nurses.<\/p>\n
Prather said it is essentially taking the average wages for each of these positions and setting the floor at about $2 higher than what the average is. She is pushing for this legislation because these job shortages don\u2019t just impact those professionals, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we don’t have other people to fill those positions, it’s a lot of unpaid labor that falls onto family members oftentimes, which then impacts their ability to get another job and pay their own bills,\u201d Prather said.<\/p>\n
Daniel Pickus, owner of Senior Helpers of Asheville, said he agrees higher wages could help providers recruit and retain workers in demanding caregiving roles.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s so important to be able to attract the right talent and get the right people to work with us and stick around and do this hard job,\u201d Pickus said. \u201cWe need to pay well, and we need to pay as best as we can.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, Pickus added that higher wage requirements could strain providers unless the cost of care also increases.<\/p>\n
This bill is heading to a Republican-led House Rules Committee. News 13 contacted Republican members of that committee for comment but has not received responses yet.<\/p>\n
Prather said she plans to continue pushing the proposal even if it does not advance this session.<\/p>\n
If approved, the wage requirements would take effect Jan. 1, 2028.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WLOS) \u2014 North Carolina lawmakers are advancing a proposal to raise the minimum wage for some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":769059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":["post-769058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=769058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/769059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=769058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=769058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=769058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}