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Unions Mobilize Publicly Paid Caregivers
September 19, 2006
Two recent newspaper stories look at the growing trend in unionization among home care aides and other workers whose wages are paid by federal, state, or local government.
An article in the September 11 Boston Globe describes 1199SEIU's efforts to organize Massachusetts' 21,000 Medicaid-funded personal care attendants.
The union is exercising an option written into a law the state legislature approved this summer (Click here for details). The law allows personal care attendants to be recognized by the state as a collective bargaining unit for the purposes of setting wages and benefits, though they would remain independent contractors in every other regard, hired, supervised, and fired (if necessary) by the consumers they work for.
If 1199SEIU collects signatures from at least 10 percent of the personal care attendants, the article explains, there will be a union election. And if the union succeeds, ''the state will probably begin paying higher wages and providing better benefits for the large pool of workers.''
Meanwhile, a September 4 article in a Spokane, Washington, paper examines the growth in unionization rates among state workers, calling it ''a trend that both opponents and supporters of unions say is troubling.''
The article, which ran in The Olympian, quotes a recent finding that only 12.5 percent of workers in the private sector and nearly three times as high a proportion -- 36.5 percent -- of those in federal, state and local government were unionized in 2005. The public employees include 23,000 home care workers who have been organized by SEIU Local 775.
While union boosters applaud the increase in enrollment among public employees, both pro- and anti-union critics say the trend ''sets up a lopsided economy where public employees will have better wages and benefits than the private-sector workers who pay taxes to support the government workers,'' the article points out.
Elise Nakhnikian
Communications Specialist
Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute
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