Letter to Editor in Chronicle of Philanthropy: Low-Wage Workers Deserve More From Nonprofits
In a letter to the editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, John A. Hartford Foundation Executive Director Corinne Rieder, F.B. Heron Foundation President Clara Miller, and PHI President Steven Dawson respond to a May 3 article, "Service Charities Seek Ways to Help Their Lowest-Paid Employees Get By.” They highlight the need to improve existing jobs as well as build career ladders for low-wage workers, including the 1.8 million home-health and personal care aides who provide services to a large number of older adults. A reprint of the full letter can be found by clicking "Read More."
In a letter to the editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, John A. Hartford Foundation Executive Director Corinne Rieder, F.B. Heron Foundation President Clara Miller, and PHIPresident Steven Dawson respond to a May 3 article, "Service Charities Seek Ways to Help Their Lowest-Paid Employees Get By.” They highlight the need to improve existing jobs as well as build career ladders for low-wage workers, including the 1.8 million home-health and personal care aides who provide services to a large number of older adults.
May 27, 2012
Low-Wage Workers Deserve More From Nonprofits
To the Editor:
Having a job is the goal of most every adult in America. A job provides true security: a steady income for food and shelter, access to health insurance, and the essential intangibles of identity and self-respect.
Yet as The Chronicle's coverage of low-wage human-services workers illustrated ("Service Charities Seek Ways to Help Their Lowest-Paid Employees Get By," May 3), millions of jobs in America do no such thing. Many of the jobs our economy is creating today offer only part-time hours, few benefits, little training—and less respect. They are clerical, retail, and restaurant jobs, and include even essential health and social-service jobs, such as personal-care and home-health aides.
Among these, the fastest-growing jobs are in home care, now employing more than 1.8 million workers nationwide (more than the number of elementary-school teachers). In fact, personal-care aides and home-health aides are the two fastest-growing occupations in America—projected by the U.S. Department of Labor to add 1.3 million net new positions this decade, a top-of-the-charts 70-percent increase. This is stunning, since home-care aides already account for one out of every 12 low-wage workers in America.
These jobs are central to our economy, but they are also important to each of us personally—for they are held by the individuals who are often essential to helping our loved ones live independently at home as they age or become disabled.
Unfortunately, most of those new 1.3 million home-care positions are likely to be of poor quality: Home-care aides earn on average $9.40 an hour, hours are often part time and episodic, training is minimal, and nearly 50 percent live in households that rely on public benefits like food stamps. Ironically, despite serving the health-care system, a third have no health insurance.
And throughout the coming decade in America, these types of poor-quality occupations will continue to expand. Of the top 10 U.S. occupations slated to contribute the most jobs this decade, three require no more than a high-school education, and five require less than a high-school education.
In response, policy makers, work-force specialists, and foundations working to improve the employment prospects of low-income people have focused primarily on "building career ladders"—that is, helping low-income workers climb out of those poor-quality jobs as fast as possible. While that is a very important strategy for a number of low-income workers, it is one that simply can't defy the math: There are far too many low-income workers, attempting to climb toward far too few "good" job openings.
So, what can be done?
In the absence of good jobs, make bad jobs better. In addition to building ladders for the few, raise the floor for many.
Cooperative Home Care Associates, a nonprofit in the South Bronx that employs nearly 2,000 home-care aides, is one organization that has made that goal central to its strategy.
Octavia Martin, who previously worked for a home-care agency that did not guarantee hours and provided no benefits, says her new employer, Cooperative Home Care, is entirely different.
"At Cooperative, I have a steady income—at least 40 hours every week—health insurance, personal days off, and I know who to turn to when I need help."
Instead of part-time employment, which is common among its competitors, Cooperative Home Care assigns aides to maximize full-time work; it also provides health insurance for many of its workers through its union affiliation; and it trains its own entry-level workers through twice as many hours as the minimum 75 hours required by law. Cooperative Home Care also employs "peer mentors" and trains its supervisors to be coaches rather than disciplinarians. One result is that Cooperative Home Care's annual turnover rate is half the industry average.
Of course, these remain relatively low-paying jobs, and so public-policy reforms are still essential.
New York State has taken a huge first step, targeting a higher minimum wage for home-care workers—requiring, by 2014, $10 an hour, plus health benefits, for home-care workers in New York City whose salaries are paid by Medicaid. At the federal level, the Labor Department has proposed regulations to offer minimum wage and overtime pay protection to home-care workers, many of whom are, remarkably, now excluded under federal law.
Similar strategies are possible in other low-wage industries—and advocates in the restaurant and day-labor sectors are engaged in parallel efforts. Therefore, public-policy makers and foundations have a critical role to play: Any work-force training funds invested in low-wage industries should be targeted solely to those employers who are pursuing full-throttle strategies to both build ladders and raise the floor—forging bad jobs into better jobs for hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers.
Steven L. Dawson, President, PHI (Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute), Board Member, Cooperative Home Care Associates, New York
Clara Miller, President, F.B. Heron Foundation, New York
Corinne H. Rieder, Executive Director & Treasurer, John. A. Hartford Foundation, New York
