Union Sues to Make County the Homecare Workers’ Boss

In a case with significant ramifications, the Los Angeles Homecare Workers Union sued Los Angeles County in Superior Court on Thursday, seeking to establish that the county is the employer of the 40,000 in-home support service workers in the county.

The union, affiliated with Local 434 of the Service Employees International Union, has been organizing the homecare workers since October and says it has already obtained authorization cards from more than 10,000 workers. These workers provide non-medical personal care, help with cooking and cleaning and transportation for people who are aged, blind or disabled. They are paid $3.72 an hour, a rate set by the county.

Union spokesman Kirk Adams said the suit stemmed from the refusal of the county to acknowledge that it is the employer of the homecare workers in an attempt to avoid unionization. Clearly, it would be impossible for the union to negotiate separate contracts for each of the 40,000 workers so the question of who is the workers’ employer is of paramount importance to the organizing campaign.

Union’s Argument

The suit maintains that the county should be deemed the employer because it sets the wage rates, determines the hours, pays the employees, keeps their employment records and can effectively lay them off by reducing the program or decreasing the numbers of hours of assistance an individual can receive.

Richard McCracken, a San Francisco labor lawyer who prepared the suit, said there are two court decisions--one state and one federal--on the issue and both support the union’s position.

McCracken said homecare workers are specifically excluded from the coverage of the National Labor Relations Act and the state law that grants collective bargaining to Civil Service employees. He said the homecare workers would properly be covered by the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act that provides for collective bargaining for city and county employees.

All the aid recipients are aged, blind or disabled people who qualify for welfare or other forms of government assistance, according to the suit.

At a meeting Dec. 17, the suit noted, Elliot Marcus, the county’s deputy director of labor relations, told union officials, “It was his position that IHSS (in-home support service) providers are not county employees for the purposes of representation” under state law.

Confident of Approval

Marcus said he “was not speaking for the Board of Supervisors but would recommend his position to the board and was confident that they would approve it,” the suit added.

Marcus was on vacation Thursday and unavailable for comment.

But Richard Dixon, the county’s chief administrative officer, said: “Our position is that they are not county employees. They are, in fact, employed by the disabled person. They are paid by the State of California,” referring to the fact that more than 90% of the program’s funding comes from the state.

“All we do as an agent for the state is determine the number of hours of care that an individual recipient requires, and we then process paper work to the state and the state controller pays the homecare worker with a state check,” Dixon added.

Adams called the county’s position illogical. “It makes no sense that an 82-year-old person with Alzheimer’s disease is the employer of record,” he said. He also noted that in many cases the county provided the aid recipient with the choice of three of four people to hire.

The county is expected to file a written response to the union suit, and a court hearing would follow.

In the meantime, union organizer Adams said the campaign will continue. He said the workers are predominantly black and Latino and about 85% are women. Adams said their sole compensation is wages. “They receive no benefits,” he said. Adams said they average about 20 hours of work a week.

Albertine Walker, a homecare worker who has signed up for union representation, said she hopes the suit succeeds because it would put the workers in a better position to get higher pay and some benefits, particularly health insurance, for the first time. She said she works up to 50 hours some weeks, with no overtime and “no reimbursement for gas” for transporting the people she assists to the doctor or the market.

“I would hope we get more pay, insurance and most all of respect,” Walker said. “It’s an important job, but the people supervising it don’t seem to know what the job is all about. . . . We’re taking care of human beings.”

Adams said wages of homecare workers in Los Angeles are lower than those in several California counties, including San Francisco, where they receive $4 an hour; Santa Barbara, where they get $4.30, and affluent Marin, which pays $4.90 an hour, tops in the state.

The Service Employees represent homecare workers in Boston, Chicago, Little Rock, New York and San Francisco. Two other unions, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the United Domestic Workers of America, are also conducting organizing campaigns among these workers.