75,000 home care workers win union rights

By Evelina Alarcon

LOS ANGELES - In the biggest organizing victory since 1937, some 75,000 Los Angeles home care workers voted last week to join the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

The mostly Latino, African American, women and immigrant workers who care for the county's elderly and disabled, voted nearly 10-to-1 for the union in what is being hailed as a landmark victory for the labor movement.

"This is truly a historic step in our campaign for quality homecare in our nation," Andy Stern, SEIU's international president, told a Los Angeles press conference announcing the victory.

Stern was joined by David Rolf, general manager of SEIU Local 434B, who coordinated the campaign and a coalition of jubilant labor leaders, home care workers, consumers and five members of the state legislature including State Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigoza and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

The SEIU triumph will boost the current 800,000 member ranks of the Los Angeles labor movement by nearly 10 percent, adding a powerful dimension to labor's ability to win its campaigns in the workplace and political arena.

The success can result in higher wages and health care coverage for thousands of Los Angeles working poor who earned $5.75 an hour with no benefits.

"These care givers - most of whom are women - have been doing what experts and government agencies said could never be done!" AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a statement congratulating the new union members.

"I believe the history books will show that their triumph will play as important a role in American history as the mass organizing drives of the 1930s."

The campaign, which began in 1987, employed an innovative strategy and creative tactics to overcome a multitude of obstacles at the workplace and in the political arena.

The very nature of home care work, with thousands of worksites, gave the organizing efforts a formidable challenge. SEIU was forced to reach beyond the workplace.

In a decade-long drive, dedicated SEIU organizers, staff and hundreds of women home care workers visited workers in their homes and churches, at bus stops - anywhere they could be found in Los Angeles County.

Over 33,000 workers were contacted and then those workers "spread the union's message to other workers, eventually creating a snowball that rolled to victory.

Lisa Hubbard, a SEIU spokesperson, told the World that the union paid close attention to the multiracial, multinational composition of home care worker.

Special steps were taken throughout the campaign, including distribution of ballots produced in English, Spanish and Armenian.

SEIU also formed a coalition of workers, religious organizations as well as senior and disabled home care consumers who, themselves, are low income.

Coalition rallies, protest marches and lobbying for state and local legislation paved the way to the union victory.

The home care program, established in 1973, pays home care workers by a mix of federal, state and local funds with county social workers determining how many hours - ranging from a few hours a week to a nine hours a day - each client receives.

A total of 400,000 California families - those of 200,000 home care workers and an equal number of consumer families - rely on the home care program.

Early on in the organizing campaign, the state courts ruled that home care workers were independent contractors without the right to organize.

In 1992, the SEIU coalition jumped that hurdle by successfully pressuring the state legislature to pass a law that authorized counties to create authorities that would administer the home care programs and serve as the employer-of-record for the workers.

Several counties in northern California formed authorities. Organizing successes followed, with 6,100 home care workers joining the union in Alameda, 5,500 in San Francisco, 4,000 in Contra Costa and 2,600 in Santa Clara counties.

Los Angeles is home to the largest section of home care consumers in California, with 8,000 of the state's 200,000.

In 1997, grass-roots pressure by the SEIU-led coalition resulted in the formation of the Personal Assistance Services Council. This consumers' oversight authority was crucial to the organizing victory.

The campaign of SEIU Local 434B now turns to a push for a wage increase to $7 an hour and for legislation to buttress the victory.

Villaraigoza is co-sponsoring Assembly Bill 16 to fund home care services to allow for wage increases and health benefits for home care workers in six California counties.

Last year, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed a similar bill. It is expected that Democrat Gov. Gray Davis, who owes much to the labor movement for his November victory, will support the measure.