Source: Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash, WBAI's Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report, March 7, 2008
(audio)
From the summary:
Domestic workers to tell their stories - of their pains, their pride and their efforts to organize. Women of color, from around the world work as domestic workers. Most are employed without a living wage, health care, and basic labor protections.
By Kristin Smith and Reagan Baughman
Monthly Labor Review
September 2007
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2007/09/art3exc.htm
Between 1970 and 2004, the labor force participation of American women rose from 43.3 percent to 59.2 percent, and one of the consequences was the development of a category of workers paid to provide care for children and the elderly who had previously been cared for in the home. Over the same period, the life expectancy of men grew by 8.1 years and the life expectancy of women rose by 5.7 years, trends that increased the demand for both medical and personal care for the elderly. In 1999, 16 percent of Americans over the age of 65 required some form of long-term care, and the majority received that care in home- or community-based settings rather than in nursing homes.
Today, direct-care workers provide the majority of paid hands-on care, supervision, and emotional support to the elderly and disabled in the United States. These paraprofessional workers hold a variety of job titles, including personal care assistant, home care aide, home health aide, and certified nursing assistant. They work in diverse settings, such as private homes, adult day centers, assisted-living residences, hospitals, and nursing homes. Depending upon their job title and the setting, a direct-care worker's tasks may include providing medical oversight, administering medications, and measuring vital signs; assisting with personal care activities, such as bathing, dressing, toileting, and eating; providing comfort and companionship; and shopping, preparing meals, and cleaning the house.
Source: Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein
Dissent
Fall 2007
"There's no place like home"--unless you're one of the 1.4 million home aides who assist elderly and disabled people but whom the Supreme Court last June abandoned to the feudal manors of the past. In Long Island Care at Home v. Evelyn Coke, the justices unanimously determined that the Department of Labor had the authority to place providers of home care outside the labor law. For seventy years, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) has guaranteed minimum wage and overtime compensation to the nation's workers, but somehow one of the fastest growing occupations of the twenty-first century doesn't deserve the status and protection of formal employment.
Source: Reagan Baughman and Kristin Smith, Monthly Labor Review, Vol. 130, Number 9, September 2007
Direct-care workers make up a low-wage, high-turnover workforce, but the demand is growing for long-term care by an aging U.S. population
Source: Robert Fazzi, Tim Ashe, Lindsay Doak, Royal Philips Electronics, 8 October, 2007
From the press release:
Industry-wide findings from largest, most comprehensive survey of home care agencies reveal growth, impact and acceptance of technology for patient management in the home.
See also:
Executive Briefing
Source: National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, June 29, 2007
From press release:
The 2007 National Home and Hospice Care Survey (NHHCS) conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will begin in August 2007 to collect information on this important segment of health care in America. The latest in a series of surveys about home health agencies and hospices, the 2007 survey will include a first-ever, nationwide survey of home health aides, the group that provides the majority of direct care to the Nation's 1.5 million home health and hospice patients.
See also:
National Home and Hospice Care Data
One in every two direct care workers and one in every three child care workers live in a low-income family (below 200 percent of the poverty line), and many live in poverty. Hourly wages for the caregiving workforce are low and many lack health insurance. Despite work, these families struggle to make ends meet. Our society depends on the care work of many paid professionals-direct care and child care workers-to help meet the daily needs of our children and the elderly. To stem turnover and provide quality services to young children and the elderly, job conditions among the direct care and child care workforce must improve, and increasing wages is a promising place to start.
Source: Domestic Workers United and DataCenter, July 2006
As immigrant workers nationwide battle for basic respect, a leading domestic workers’ organization released a full, unprecedented report detailing exploitative conditions and demographics of the nation’s most hidden low-wage industry. The report combines statistical analysis of data from over 500 mostly immigrant workers with personal stories of workers and employers, in a joint effort between DataCenter and Domestic Workers United. Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley's introduction explains how the nation's troubled history of race, gender and class inequality come shamefully together in its domestic work industry. New York University's Immigrant Rights Clinic delivers a historical look at why the law continues to ignore household labor, perpetuating ancient views that domestic labor is not "real" work.
In 2002, Mujeres Unidas y Activas and the San Francisco Day Labor Program Women’s Collective of La Raza Centro Legal came together to analyze and to strategize to improve the household work industry. Because there is no official data available about the number of household workers or information about their work conditions in California, these membership-based and membership-led organizations of low-income immigrant Latina women, many of whom are household workers, joined with the DataCenter and the San Francisco Department of Public Health to create a participatory research project to assess the industry. Over thirty immigrant women were trained to administer the survey and together they collected two hundred and forty surveys from their peers in the San Francisco Bay Area. The hour-long surveys were conducted on buses, in parks, at Laundromats and in the homes of household workers. As the Household Worker Rights Coalition Survey (HWRC Survey) results make clear, this is a very vulnerable industry. Rampant abuses of household workers must be addressed.