First contract for 13,000 homecare workers

If ratified, the two-year contract will provide some 13,000 caregivers — members of Service Employees Local 503, Oregon Public Employees Union, Sub-Local 99 — with pay raises, health insurance and workers’ compensation coverage.

Ratification ballots have been mailed and are due back by July 28.

The contract is with the Home Care Commission, which was established in November 2000 when Oregon voters passed Ballot Measure 99, a landmark constitutional amendment that gave home health care workers the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Home health care workers are not employees of the state, but are under contract with the state to provide in-home care for senior citizens and the disabled through Medicaid, Oregon Project Independence and the Spousal Care Program.

The contract contains a lot of important “firsts” — workers’ comp coverage, health care coverage and tax withholding — for homecare workers who for decades were denied those rights. And, said Tim Nesbitt, president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, “It was the first time that our initiative process was used to establish collective bargaining rights.”

“This is an excellent first contract, especially given the financial times we are living in,” said Karen Thompson of Scio, a caregiver for her disabled husband while herself fighting ovarian cancer for the past years.

“I think everyone should have health insurance. It’s a horrible feeling when you don’t,” she said.

Ellen Lowe, a longtime human services advocate, said the agreement “represents the culmination of an effort by seniors, people with disabilities and their caregivers to address serious workforce issues that include a 75 percent turnover rate, lack of training, poor wages and the lack of health care and workers’ compensation coverage. Oregon has always had reason to be proud of its system of long-term care and this continues that tradition.”

A year after creation of the Home Care Commission, homecare workers voted by a 92 percent margin for union representation, making it the largest-ever union election victory in Oregon, the AFL-CIO said.

Seventeen months and one day later they had a tentative agreement, said Karla Spence of SEIU Local 503. The deal provides for:

• A 40-cent per hour raise, to $8.72, effective July 1.

• Health insurance, for employees only, effective April 2004. Employees must work a minimum of 88 hours per month.

• Eight hours of paid time off per year, for those working 80 hours or more per month.

• Workers’ compensation insurance, effective April 2004.

• An agreement to withhold state and federal taxes. Currently, home-care workers, like the self-employed, must take care of withholding their own taxes and paying them quarterly, a time-consuming process.

• There also could be a 30-cent-an-hour pay increase in 2005, but that’s contingent on finding out how much the workers’ compensation will cost.

© Oregon Labor Press Publishing Co. Inc.