Will Home-Based Unionism Survive?
Caring for America
By STEVE EARLY
Counterpunch
Oct. 22, 2012
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/22/caring-for-america/

America's growing workforce of home-based
care-givers has provided the labor movement with its
main source of recent  membership growth, in a period
of overall union decline.

Some of these gains were rolled back last year in
states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. There,
Republican governors have un-done the union organizing
deals, made by their Democratic predecessors, that
created new bargaining units composed of state-funded
home health aides or child care providers. As a result,
tens of thousands of newly organized workers have lost
their precarious toehold at the bottom rung of public
employment.

In other states, where funding has been reduced and
direct-care jobs curtailed or eliminated, low-income
Americans have suffered both as workers and clients.
The predominantly female, largely non-white labor force
that cares for young, old, and disabled people
continues to get organized where political conditions
permit. In Connecticut, for example, 11,000 Medicaid-
paid personal care attendants and state-funded day care
workers won union recognition earlier this year from
labor-friendly legislators and new Democratic Governor
Dan Malloy.

However, as part of the nationwide conservative
counter-attack against public sector unionism, multiple
lawsuits were quickly filed against this expansion of
collective bargaining in Connecticut, a delaying tactic
used in other states. In Missouri, for example, the
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the
American Federation of State, County, and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME) engineered a statewide referendum
authorizing homecare unionism in 2008. But even after
the two unions later won representation votes among
13,000 workers, right-wing opponents succeeded in
delaying first contract negotiations for nearly four
years- until the state supreme court finally upheld
union certification.

In California, Jerry Brown--a governor elected, like
Malloy, with strong labor support--vetoed a bill passed
by state legislators that would have allowed child care
providers to unionize, more speedily, through a card
check process. Home health aides in California--many of
whom care for a member of their own family-are already
heavily unionized. But, citing fiscal constraints,
Brown balked at extending bargaining rights to their
thousands of under-paid counterparts in home-based
child-care.

Home Care, Before and After

In their new book, Caring for America: Home Health
Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford
University Press), Eileen Boris, chair of the Feminist
Studies Department at UC-Santa Barbara, and Jennifer
Klein, a history professor at Yale, describe the
contested terrain of home-based labor, now and in the
past. The authors provide valuable historical
background on the emergence of this still largely
invisible and undervalued workforce.  They also offer a
balanced of assessment of the strengths and weaknesses
of recent union growth in this sector, which has been
accompanied by considerable inter-union competition and
conflict in California, Illinois, and other states.

Caring for America includes detailed case studies of
successful home care organizing, often aided by
experienced organizers from ACORN (before that
well-known community organization was weakened by
internal dysfunction, demonized by the right, defunded
by its friends, and effectively dismantled as a
national entity).

Prior to winning union representation in about twenty
states, home healthcare aides and childcare providers
were classified as "independent contractors." This left
them with little or no organizational voice in their
"non-traditional" workplaces.

Even with union contracts, which sometimes took many
years of struggle to win, their jobs often pay too
little and lack full benefit coverage. Two-thirds of
the 2.5 million workers who provide direct care in
clients' homes are still awaiting action by the Obama
Administration to extend minimum wage and overtime law
protections unfairly denied to them under the federal
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

Waiting For Obama

As Boris and Klein noted last month in Labor Notes,
Obama's foot-dragging on this U.S. Department of Labor
rule-making initiative increases the possibility it may
become a casualty of Democratic defeat next month. "If
Mitt Romney wins the White House, not only will this
initiative be dead in the water," they predicted, "but
the Republicans in Congress have already introduced
bills to permanently classify aides and attendants as
'companions' rather than as workers" entitled to normal
FLSA coverage. (For more details on this controversy,
see
http://labornotes.org/2012/08/home-care-workers-still-
waiting-obama)

As Boris and Klein document, the deepest economic
crisis since the Great Depression, public sector budget
crises everywhere, and right-wing ascendancy in some
state capitals has exposed an "Achilles heel of the
organizing model established by SEIU and copied by
other unions."  Top-down union organizing victories,
achieved through political deals with labor-friendly
politicians, are now vulnerable in a sector where the
work was "already insecure and unstable, with constant
turnover."   Home-based worker unionism will not
survive, they fear, unless "workers themselves have
been able to build the union" through "member-to-member
organizing," rank-and-file leadership development, the
creation of "social bonds," and a continuing reliance
on "mobilized political action." The authors argue
that:

"Unions must have social depth and a culture that
enables them to live on when workers (or leaders or
staff) move in and out and that sustain political
activism at the state house where the budget and wages
take shape. Those who do the work have to be at the
table and part of the process. And when political deals
fall through, there has to be power on the ground."

While appreciative of the economic gains made for home
care workers in New York, California, and Illinois, the
authors warn about the tendency toward a "bureaucratic
unionism that reinforces the old racialized gender
distinctions of care work and stymies the advancement
of rank-and-file women." Building real grassroots
organization among home-based workers isolated from
other union members and lacking traditional union
structures (like a shop steward network) has never been
easy. But, according to the authors, this work is now
more necessary than ever to help thwart further
"welfare state" dismantling.

Wisconsin Lessons?

The dramatic and unusual display of grassroots activism
in Wisconsin last year has shown the potential for a
different kind of  public sector unionism. During the
winter of 2011, rank-and-file union members there broke
with business as usual, by using direct action on the
job in the form of teacher sick-outs and occupying the
state capitol to protest budget cuts and anti-union
legislation.

For thousands of direct-care providers, the fight to
defend recently acquired bargaining rights, modest
first contact gains, or adequate program funding was an
important, if little noticed, part of labor's larger
struggle against Governor Scott Walker and his GOP
clones elsewhere in the mid-west.

Too often this campaign was couched, misleadingly, as a
defense of "the middle class." In reality, as Caring
for America confirms, the working poor who care for
other poor people -- and many of us in other classes --
haven't made it that far up the ladder yet.  Their
paltry pay, lack of benefit coverage, limited training
and promotional opportunities all belie the importance
of the work they do every day, in difficult
non-institutional settings.

Organized labor would do well to put their continuing
plight front and center because there are no union "fat
cats" anywhere to be found in the fields of home care
and childcare in 21st century America.

Steve Early is labor journalist who worked for 27 years
as an organizer for the Communications Workers of
America.  He is the author most recently of The Civil
Wars in U.S. Labor which reports on home-based worker
organizing in New Jersey, California, Illinois, and
other states.  Early can be reached at [log in to unmask]

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