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Home care workers (HCWs) are professionals who provide care to older adults and people with disabilities at home. However, HCWs are vulnerable and especially susceptible to wage theft, or not being paid their legally-entitled wages in full by their employers. Prior work has examined other low-wage work settings to show how technology is designed and deployed has the potential to both cause and address wage theft. We extend this work by examining the relationship between technology and wage theft in the home care context. We collaborated closely with a local grassroots organization to conduct interviews with workers and labor, legal, and payroll experts. We uncovered how the complex, volatile, and diverse nature of home care complicates the errors in time-tracking systems. Through design provocations and focus groups with workers and experts, we also investigated the potential of technology as a part of broader efforts to curb wage theft through educating and empowering isolated HCWs. While we found that approachable design could reduce errors in existing systems, make employer processes more transparent, and help workers exchange knowledge to build collective power, we also discuss concerns around burden, privacy, and accountability when designing technologies for HCWs and other low-wage workers. 

Home health aides are paid professionals who provide long-term care to an expanding population of adults who need it. However, aides' work is often unrecognized by the broader caregiving team despite being in demand and crucial to care---an invisibility reinforced by ill-suited technological tools. In order to understand the invisible work aides perform and its relationship to technology design, we interviewed 13 aides employed by home care agencies in New York City. These aides shared examples that demonstrated the intertwined nature of both types of invisible work (i.e., emotions- and systems-based) and expanded the sociological mechanisms of invisibility (i.e., sociocultural, sociolegal, sociospatial) to include the sociotechnical. Through these findings, we investigate the opportunities, tensions, and challenges that could inform the design of tools created for these important, but often overlooked, frontline caregivers. 

This study examines the unique challenges facing rural home care workers. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken between July 2021 and February 2022 with 23 participants that have experience in rural home care delivery. The major challenge confronting rural home care workers involved distance and transportation. This challenge emerged due to long distance between clients, unreliable vehicles, inadequate reimbursement, and inclement weather. In turn, this challenge exacerbated three other types of challenges facing rural home care workers: workforce challenges that consisted of a persistent labor shortage and shorter visits that forced workers to rush through tasks, client isolation due to the social and physical seclusion of households, and the poor working conditions of home care work more broadly. Without policy interventions that respond to these particular challenges, the care gap in rural areas can be expected to grow.