Organizing Effort by Union Targets Home Care Aides

The nation’s fastest-growing labor union is in a high-profile, high-stakes battle to recruit 40,000 Los Angeles area home health care and domestic workers.

The campaign is of considerable import to the 850,000-member Service Employees International Union and to Los Angeles County, which ultimately may have to bargain with the union.

Using grass-roots techniques and aided by ministers in South-Central Los Angeles, the union says it has obtained authorization cards from nearly 15,000 of the workers, all of whom work at different sites. This is a virtually unprecedented achievement in a difficult era for organized labor, labor relations experts said.

County’s Position

Normally, that would be enough signatures to force a representation election. However, the county has refused to recognize the union, taking the position that the workers are not county employees, but employees of individual clients. Both sides are headed into court next month for a showdown.

The significance of the campaign to the union is clear from the resources it is devoting to the effort. The union has brought in a dozen organizers, including some of its top health care specialists, from Massachusetts, Texas and other states. It held a highly public founding convention for a home care workers local in January, featuring actress Marla Gibbs and the union’s international president, John Sweeney. And the union has done detailed studies of the work force and the home care industry.

The service employees union also has staged militant demonstrations on the workers’ behalf. Earlier this month, after the union threatened to picket the home of Eddy Tanaka, director of the county Department of Public Social Services, Tanaka agreed to set up a hot line to take complaints from workers whose paychecks do not arrive on time.

Union’s Objectives

“We’re trying to get ahead of the curve by organizing an emerging sector of the health care work force before it is as big as the nursing home industry,” said Gerry Shea, the international’s health care director in Washington. He said the union is attempting to elevate wages, secure basic fringe benefits and improve training to avoid what he characterized as poor working conditions in the nursing home industry.

Some union backers are drawing parallels between the organizing drive and the landmark 1968 battle to unionize sanitation workers in Memphis, during which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

“This is Memphis all over again,” the Rev. James Lawson, a vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, told a rally in South-Central Los Angeles commemorating the 20th anniversary of King’s death. He noted that the city of Memphis resisted granting recognition to the sanitation workers’ union, as has the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors with the home care workers’ efforts.

The home care workers, who are paid $3.72 an hour and receive no benefits, take care of elderly and disabled people who have been certified as eligible by the county Department of Public Social Services. About 35% to 40% of the workers are relatives of the client. Typically, the workers labor about 28 hours a week, although some work 40 hours, with the time split between two clients.

They cook meals, mop floors, bathe and cloth the blind and infirm, take them to the doctor, buy their groceries, dispense medicine, fill out insurance forms and in some instances, they say, provide the only companionship the clients have.

The program currently serves 52,000 people in Los Angeles County, and for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1988, has a budget of $207.3 million. About 61% of that comes from the federal government, 34% from the state and the remaining 5% from the county.

The home care workers, 88% of whom are women, are mostly middle-aged blacks and Latinos. The union drive is emphasizing organization as a means to better pay, health insurance, a gasoline allowance and “dignity” in their relations with county government.

“Your job is nothin’ in a sense,” said Albertine Walker, 66, a three-year home care worker who supports the union campaign. “It’s an important job, but the people that are supervising it don’t seem to know what the job is all about.”

Los Angeles’ wage rate is the same as 26 other California counties, including Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura.

Nineteen counties pay less, with the lowest rate at $3.61 an hour. Fourteen counties pay more, including San Diego at $3.77, San Francisco at $4 and Santa Barbara at $4.30. Affluent Marin County pays the most--$4.92 an hour.

County officials, noting that clients have the right to hire and fire workers, is resisting the organizing drive by taking the position that workers are the individual employees of each client, not the county.

But union organizer Kirk Adams notes that the county sets wages, keeps employment records, notifies the state to pay the workers and can effectively lay off the worker or reduce work hours by controlling how many hours of assistance an individual client is eligible to receive.

Superior Court Judge Warren Deering has scheduled a May 23 hearing on the dispute.

Adams said the union expects to win, which would pave the way for recognition by the county.

But Elliot Marcus, the county’s director of employee relations, said that a union victory in the suit would simply precipitate “a whole raft” of other legal questions. He said these would include whether the workers are civil service employees and whether the workers who are relatives of their clients are eligible to be in the union.

He said the county has done no formal analysis of the potential costs of unionization. But Marcus said, “It will be a tremendous expense if there’s a fringe benefit package.”

The union claimed Friday that the county could save millions of dollars if the workers were to get health insurance because they would no longer be so dependent on county-financed health services such as emergency rooms and public clinics.

County supervisors are treating the issue cautiously. Supervisor Pete Schabarum said through an aide that he believes it would be a “bad precedent” to make the home care workers county employees. An aide to Supervisor Kenneth Hahn said he is studying the issue. Supervisor Ed Edelman said he could see “some benefit coming out of the organization of these people.” Supervisors Mike Antonovich and Deane Dana declined to return calls.

Penny Feldman, a lecturer at the Harvard University School of Public Health, who has been the research director of a Ford Foundation-funded study of home health care in four cities, including San Diego, cited some advantages to unionization. She said the study showed greater job satisfaction and less turnover among workers who were paid better and received benefits such as health insurance, improvements that flow from union contracts. “Turnover is very important to clients,” she said.

Richard Daggett, president of the Polio Survivors Assn. in Downey, said he is one of about 200 people in Southern California who has a home care worker living in his house full time.

Daggett said it is “very difficult to find someone at the wages they allow” and added he favors increased wages, health insurance and paid vacation for the workers.

However, Daggett said there was one aspect of unionization that worries him, fearing that if the county is declared the workers’ employer, the client’s right to hire and fire the worker might be taken away.

“We don’t want someone to say who lives in our house,” he said.

Union organizer Adams said the union does not “want to restrict the hiring and firing rights” of the clients.

Home care workers have been unionized in several cities, including Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. In those places, the government has sub-contracted the work to a private company or nonprofit organization that negotiates with the union.