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Jennifer Klein and Eileen Boris,
"Organizing Home Care"
(page 4 of 4)
Our forthcoming book, Caring For America, traces the various
stories of home care workers. We follow home care's political trajectory
in both New York and other cities, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and San
Francisco, to see how workers and community organizers experimented with
strategies that would make unionism in this sector succeed for clients
and caretakers. Successful strategies include organizing in the
community, direct action tactics, mass visits to the legislature, female
rank and file leadership, and a new kind of steward system that could
meet the needs of workers who often could not leave the home. We also
write about social movements among the disabled and the elderly, which
became crucial to home care workers organizing. Not only did workers
organize on their own, but they cultivated political strategies and
relationships at the state level. They too sought public benefits that
would enable them to live with security and dignity. Together, they took
labor that seemed private and projected it into the public sphere,
turning the welfare state into their terrain of social struggle. They
have also had to build concepts and strategies reflective of the
increasingly complex inter-personal relations essential to care work.
Before the current recession, New York's home care aides made less
than those in California, where unions more successfully gained higher
wages through bargaining with the state. Many still had to rely on the
strategies of the poor—turning to welfare or Medicaid, living with
relatives, and taking on extra jobs. One of these retired workers,
Jamaican immigrant Evelyn Coke, became the plaintiff in a high-profile
lawsuit initiated by SEIU to challenge their exclusion from FLSA. Coke
spent twenty years cooking for, cleaning up after, and bathing clients
on Long Island, sometimes working twenty-four-hour shifts but rarely
paid for overtime.[9]
Coke v. Long Island Care at Home exposed the limits of the
search for care on the cheap. In its brief to the Supreme Court, New
York City rationalized the exemption on the basis of expense. In
contrast, civil, women's, and immigrant rights groups stressed the need
to correct prior discrimination against household workers and revalue
domestic labor. In foregrounding the concerns of receivers of domestic
and personal services, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer erased the
presence of providers. The Court unanimously ruled against Coke in
2007.[10]
However, it left open the door for Congressional action or
administrative rule changes. Long-term care could be added to social
insurance, so that it becomes a right of citizenship.
Yet as our historical research has found, it takes personal and
social transformation to tackle the more fundamental challenge:
revaluing the labor of care. Trade unionism or other forms of collective
organization, as with Domestic Workers United in New York, enables
home-based caregivers to find others doing the same labor, recognize it
as real work, form cultures of solidarity across race and ethnic lines,
and become active political agents who put in the forefront the most
urgent needs of our society. Such care worker unionism pleas for larger
social benefits, advocating better care and better jobs. It not only
seeks to make the home a place of dignity and respect for all those who
labor there, but to recognize our fundamental human connection.
Endnotes
1. Robin Herman, "Demand for Home-Care Workers Is
Rising in City," New York Times 2 October 1981.
[Return to text]
2. Patrick McGeehan, "For New York, Big Job Growth
in Home Care," New York Times 25 May 2007. [Return to text]
3. Rhonda J.V. Montgomery, Lyn Holley, Jerome
Deichert, and Karl Kosloski, "A Profile of Home Care Workers From the
2000 Census: How It Changes What We Know," The Gerontologist 45:
5 (2005), 593-600. [Return to text]
4. See
"Demand
Still Rising Fast for Direct Care
Workers" on the Direct Care Alliance, Inc. blog (accessed 27
December 2009). [Return to text]
5. This narrative appears in another from in our
book, Caring for America: Home Health Workers Under the Shadow of the
Welfare State, forthcoming from Oxford University
Press. [Return to text]
6. Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social
Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press,
2006). [Return to text]
7. "Report on the Quality of Care and Operating
Practices of the Home Attendant Program: Summary of Significant
Observations," Oct. 25, 1978, unpublished manuscript, New York State
Library; Metropolitan Regional Audit Office, "Audit of Home Attendant
Services, New York City, Department of Social Services,
#76-835-S-029-58," Aug. 1977, McMillan Library, NYC, 8, 14-18; Joan
Shepard, "Payroll Foulup Angers Home Health Attendants," New York Daily
News, 16 December 1977; Peter Khiss, "Program to Aid Elderly Sick Poor
Marked By Fraud, State Audit Says," New York Times, 15 December 1977;
Richard Severo, "Troubled Program for the Disabled," New York Times, 27
December 1977. [Return to text]
8. "Union Steps up Drive to Organize Household
Workers," 32B-32J Newsletter, 46 (May 1978), 1. [Return to text]
9. Steven Greenhouse, "Justices to Hear Care on
Wages of Home Aides," New York Times 25 March
2007. [Return to text]
10. Long Island Care at Home, Ltd. v. Evelyn
Coke, 127 S.Ct. 2339 (2007). [Return to text]
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