A court ruled yesterday that caregivers attending to patients 24 hours a day are not entitled to overtime pay. The ruling means that hundreds of thousands of elderly and disabled people in Israel will not have to increase the pay of their nurses and caregivers.

The National Labor Court's decision was passed by a majority of judges after reviewing a petition by Kav-La'Oved, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the rights of migrant workers. The appeal was made in the name of the Filipino caregiver of an 80-year-old woman needing constant automated resuscitation.

The caregiver's job was to make sure the pipe supplying the woman with air was clean and free from obstructions. One year after quitting her job, the caregiver sued to receive overtime pay for each hour that she worked beyond an eight-hour quota. 

The court ruled that the law of Work & Rest Hours does not apply to caregivers employed in 24-hour care. The court named two reasons for its decision, the first of which is that they work "in managerial posts requiring a special degree of personal trust." Therefore, exceptions to the labor laws do not apply to them, as the nature of their work precludes all efforts to regulate their work and rest hours, according to the court's ruling.

The other reason given was that in the case of the caregivers, overtime pay would place too heavy a financial burden on patients, thereby making care services a privilege reserved for the wealthy.

The issue of pay to caregivers employed on a 24-hour basis had strained the judicial system for many years prior to yesterday's ruling. Judge Elisheva Barak of the National Labor Court attempted to resolve the issue several years ago by awarding caregivers an overall 30 percent raise in pay to replace the calculation of specific work hours, but the settlement did not last.

Labor Court President Steve Adler has opposed the settlement from the onset, and was also in opposition of the court's ruling on the matter yesterday. He believes caregivers are entitled to overtime pay, and that efforts should be made to assess the work hours they put in even if an accurate assessment is difficult to achieve.

Some claim a distinction must be drawn between rest and on-call hours, while some maintain that caregivers merely sleep at their place of work, and therefore need not be compensated for remaining after hours. Dr. Yuval Livnat, legal adviser for Kav-La'Oved, maintains that the issue does constitute a legal case.

Livnat and Attorney Hani Ben-Israel, who wrote the petition, claim that the exceptions referred to in the court's verdict were not devised for low-paying caregivers, but rather for senior managers. They view the claim that raising the caregivers' pay would place a strain on their employers as irrelevant.

"The financial state of the employer cannot and must not constitute a consideration in determining workers' rights, and immigrant groups should not be made to pay for the cost of care services," their petition reads.

The petition also noted that the care of the elderly and disabled is the responsibility of the state. In addition, it maintained that depriving overtime pay from caregivers constituted racial and national discrimination, seeing as nearly all caregivers were foreign nationals, most of them women.