Year in and year out, Evelyn Coke left her Queens house early to go to the homes of elderly, sick, often dying people. She bathed them, cooked for them, helped them dress and monitored their medications. She sometimes worked three consecutive 24-hour shifts.

She loved the work, but she earned only around $7 an hour and got no overtime pay. For years Ms. Coke, a single mother of five, quietly grumbled, and then, quite uncharacteristically, rebelled. In a case that reached the Supreme Court in 2007, Ms. Coke sued to reverse federal labor regulations that exempt home care agencies from having to pay overtime.

“I hope they try to help me because I need help bad,” she said in April 2007 after listening to oral arguments. She had stopped working after being hurt in a car accident six years earlier, and by then used a wheelchair.

The court unanimously rejected her claims, saying that Congress had given the Labor Department explicit authority to include home care workers in minimum wage and overtime protection and the agency had chosen to exclude them.

“I feel robbed,” Ms. Coke said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I feel glad it’s come to everybody’s attention; people are supposed to get paid when they work.”

Ms. Coke’s health deteriorated until she died of heart failure on July 9, in Manhasset, N.Y., her son Michael Findlay said last week, after returning from his mother’s burial in Jamaica. He said he believed a serious bedsore had contributed to her death, and recalled the many people she had helped with bedsores. Ms. Coke was 74.

As a symbol, Evelyn Coke remains alive as both Congress and the Obama administration review regulations that carry out amendments to a 1938 law on wages. In June, 15 senators and 37 House members wrote to Hilda L. Solis, secretary of labor, urging her to eliminate the exemption for home attendants.
 

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