Home care campaign by Local 503 nears completion

By DON McINTOSH, Staff Reporter

The campaign to unionize Oregon's home health care workers - by far the state's largest union drive in decades - is nearing completion. Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 503, Oregon Public Employees Union, expects to file for election within two months with the Oregon Employment Relations Board, reports Organizing Director Steven Ward. The union hopes to have an election by the end of the year.

Approximately 13,000 people are paid by the State of Oregon to care for disabled people who live at home; so far the union has signed up 3,700 of them as dues-paying members. To file for election, the union must have signed authorization cards from 30 percent, or about 3,900 workers.

Union organizers say the response among the workers they reach has been overwhelmingly pro-union. But the program has proven a very challenging target for organizing nonetheless because of 70 percent annual turnover. Every month, between 500 and a 1,000 workers leave and are replaced, including hundreds who have joined the union. And each month, the union gets a new list of workers from the state.

The union has 12 to 13 staff working full-time on the campaign, aided by 50 to 60 home health care workers who've been trained as organizers. All told, they've attempted 22,000 house visits, and talked with about 5,000 workers.

Funded by Medicaid, home care programs in Oregon and other states allow disabled people to remain in their homes; they've been lauded as far cheaper than nursing home care and more compassionate. But unions and clients of the program agree - up to now they've been operating on the basis of exploited labor.

Oregon home care workers currently make $8.14 an hour (except live-in caregivers, whose pay amounts to a little over $4 an hour). They have no health care, not even workers' compensation insurance for injuries on the job. Nor do they have paid time off of any kind. Tasks vary, but include housework, cooking, cleaning, bathing, and handling catheters and colostomy bags.

The drive to unionize has been under way for about four years, and has been in high gear for the last two. From the beginning, a crucial leg of the campaign has been politics.

Because previously the state had considered the workers employees of their clients, home health care workers had to create their own "employer of record" by ballot measure. Measure 99, on the ballot in November 2000, passed in every Oregon county, garnering 63 percent statewide.

Under the measure, a board was created to serve as a formal employer, to provide training to the workers and create a registry for clients to locate caregivers.

"It was the first time ever that collective bargaining rights were extended through a ballot measure," Ward said. The next phase was to get the Legislature to appropriate funds for the board. Ward says unionists were told at the beginning of the 2001 legislative session that getting funding out of a Republican-led Legislature would be impossible. But home health care workers and their allies in unions and senior and disabled groups ignored that advice. They generated 6,000 letters to targeted legislators, particularly in rural districts such as Elgin, Klamath Falls and Umatilla. Delegations of home care workers and disabled people, bringing home-made cookies as gifts, visited every legislator to lobby for HB 3816, which would allocate $300,000 to fund the home care commission.

"It was so exciting," said Karen Thompson, a home care worker who is president of the home care worker sub-local. "We got to pour out our stories. We weren't isolated any more."

When it came to a vote, approval was unanimous in the Oregon House of Representatives and 26 to 4 in the Senate.

A ballot measure similar to Oregon's has qualified for the November 2001 ballot in Washington, which employs about 16,500 home care workers. Both measures are modeled on earlier successes in California, where home care workers have been organized county by county since the programs that pay them are administered at the county level.

In Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento counties, SEIU won the right to organize, organized the workers, and won contracts with substantial wage improvements - pay rose from minimum wage to $9 to $11 an hour, and workers got medical and dental benefits for the first time.

Organizing efforts are also under way in Illinois and New York. A national convention of unionized home care workers, the first of its kind, is being planned to take place Portland in April 2002.