Jennifer Klein and Eileen Boris,
"Organizing Home Care"
(page 3 of 4)
The contractor strategy resulted in marked deterioration of both the
conditions of labor and the care received. Repeated investigations found
egregious problems for both workers and clients. As a consequence of not
being covered for over-time, some home attendants ended up making less
than minimum wage. Audits found "inordinate delays and errors in
payment," with workers waiting weeks or even months for wages.
Attendants often called the mayor's office to complain of utility
shut-off notices. Elderly and disabled clients reportedly drew upon
"their own Supplemental Security Income checks" to help attendants. The
Division of Home Attendant Service and its vendor agencies also seemed
to exploit the caring part of home health
care.[7] For example, there
were weeks in which housekeepers received no paychecks at all, yet they
continued working, since they could not abandon their clients. Despite
these known problems, policymakers continued to insist that welfare
recipients be pushed into these jobs to end their "dependency" on the
state.
Workers began to organize and fight back in the late 1970s,
especially as they came to recognize that they were largely serving
clients of the Division of Home Attendant Service. During August 1977, a
grassroots organizing effort emerged in the South Bronx amongst
disgruntled home care aides who had not been paid for weeks. With
guidance from a grass-roots neighborhood organization, La Raza Unida, a
core group of Afro-Caribbean, African-American, and Puerto Rican women
organized a union. Although employed through the Morrisania Community
Corporation, a vendor agency, they went to the city government to demand
redress. After waging an eight-day strike, with help from the Teamsters
the women won union recognition. The City, however, had no intention of
bargaining and instead terminated its contract with Morrisania and
reassigned the women to other agencies. While not an individual success,
this was just the beginning of a new social struggle.
Other unions started paying attention. The civil rights movement had
begun to emphasize the status of domestic workers, pushing New York
State to pass collective bargaining legislation for household workers.
In response, New York's flagship local of the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU), 32B-32J, launched an organizing campaign
among household workers "to organize and to free you good people from
slavery."[8]
When SEIU sought to win bargaining rights for household
workers as public employees, the city outmaneuvered them by shifting all
clients to agency vendors. Thus, the union had to organize each agency,
whatever the size, one at a time. The initial response was tremendous,
but this strategy soon succumbed to the hassle of having to define
bargaining units piecemeal, and to an ever-shifting labor force while
state budgets constrained agencies from negotiating real wage increases.
New York's hospital workers' movement, Local 1199, however, knew how
to turn workplace drives into political campaigns. In 1987, it launched
(with AFSCME) the Campaign for Justice for Home Care Workers, joining
forces with non-profit vendor agencies to press for greater
appropriations from Albany. It mobilized significant community pressure,
as well as support from clergy, including Cardinal John O'Connor, and
political leaders, such as Jesse Jackson. In 1988, after unprecedented
negotiations between Governor Mario Cuomo's office and the unions, the
state allocated more funds to home health care and agreed to a major
wage increase, health insurance, guaranteed days off, and prescription
drug coverage.
This political deal was not enough to resolve the ambiguities of
employment that hampered long-term rights and job security. Workers
still lacked the protection of the nation's basic employment law. The
intimacy of the work and its location in private homes continued to
obscure care work as labor in multiple ways: through ideological and
discursive dismissal of such labor as real or worthy work; through the
service ethos of some care workers that leads them to work beyond their
paid hours; and through legal classification that refuses to recognize
the home as a workplace and the care worker as a worker. Home care
workers and their disabled and senior clients and allies have both had to
challenge pervasive stereotypes and representations. Home care workers
are characterized as self-sacrificing workers, while their clients are
stigmatized as helplessly dependent on others, as well as on the
state.
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