Growing older is hard, and taking care of an aging loved one is hard work. For those of us who are aging or living with a disability, your family might hire a caregiver for day-to-day support: getting out of bed, minding medications, bathing and cooking meals — and sometimes serving as a medic, housekeeper, therapist and closest companion, too. Yet for all the loving care that health aide gives every day, she’ll be lucky if she takes home enough money to make this month’s rent.

Welcome to the “care economy” — the booming service sector that has emerged from America’s rapidly graying boomer population. On the surface, in-home elder and disability services offer a more family-oriented, community-based alternative to a traditional nursing home. But for the care worker, this apparently progressive model also means workdays that never end, along with the twisting of sensitive interpersonal relationships of care into a massive, barely regulated industry, rife with exploitation.

But the industry is shifting. The Obama administration just closed a longstanding labor-law loophole to provide federal minimum wage and overtime pay to home care workers, starting next January. The widely hailed rule change affects potentially two million workers — typically low-income women, including formal nursing aides and domestic workers providing medical services. It’s a step toward dismantling exclusionary laws that have for generations pressed poor women to the margins of the workforce.