These revisions will provide minimum wage and overtime protections for workers who provide in-home care services for the elderly and infirm.

The administration wants to make it easier for employers to exempt many of those workers from overtime protection by classifying them as administrative, professional or executive personnel.

PHI supports revising the companionship exemption so that home care aides are no longer excluded from federal minimum wage and overtime protections.

"Our intent is always to strengthen overtime protections," Ms. Chao said at a news conference in Washington.

Twenty or thirty seconds after homeowners opened their doors, Ms. Skorupa asked whether they opposed President Bush's plan to reduce overtime protections for many Americans.

Worse, the administration is trying to implement a regulation that would deny overtime protection for more than eight million men and women.

But they also allow more workers than previously to be classified as exempt from overtime protection, as administrators, professionals or executives.

At that time, five categories were identified as being "exempt" from minimum wage and overtime protections, and therefore salariable.

If implemented, the regulation would grant minimum wage and overtime protections to home care workers throughout the U.S.

Five categories were identified as being "exempt" from minimum wage and overtime protections, and therefore salariable-executive, administrative, professional, computer, and outside sales employees.