Home Health Care Workers Set to Lose Hard-Fought Gains
By LAURENCE DARMIENTO
Staff Reporter
Los Angeles County’s 97,000 home health care workers can’t seem to catch a break.
It took them more than a decade to win a modest hourly raise from the county Board of Supervisors. Just a year later, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bare-bones budget proposal is threatening to rescind it, sending them all back to minimum wage.
The governor also has proposed eliminating all funding for a program that allows spouses and parents to be paid to take care of their loved ones.
“It’s draconian,” said Tyrone Freeman, general president of Local 434B of the Service Employees International Union, which represents the workers. “It’s such a drastic cut at one time.”
After an organizing effort that stretched back a decade, home care workers convinced supervisors in December 2002 to raise their wages from the minimum of $6.75 to $7.50 an hour. (The workers are essentially independent contractors but are paid by the county.)
The union saw it as the first step to future raises that would bring local home care workers in line with those in some other counties, who earn as much as $11 an hour.
The county pays only one-fifth of the wages, with the state and federal governments paying the rest. But supervisors have been reluctant to grant raises contending that the true financial beneficiary is the state, since home care tends to keep the aged, sick and disabled out of nursing homes, where state and federal governments foot the bill.
The governor’s proposal would withdraw all state matching funds for salaries above the minimum wage, forcing counties to foot the entire bill. That would total $72 million annually for Los Angeles County.
“I can’t speak for the Board of Supervisors, but certainly up to now the county has never provided wages and benefits in the program in which the state did not pay their share,” said Phil Ansell, a manager at the county Department of Public Social Services.
Then there is the so-called Residual Program, which helps provide care to recipients not eligible for federal funding. That includes those whose spouses and parents are paid to take care of them and those who need services such as transportation but can take care of their personal needs. Dementia and Alzheimer patients also receive special services.
Under the governor’s proposed mid-year cuts, the program would be eliminated in April. Continuing the program would require the county to pick up the entire annual tab of $164 million; it currently pays 35 percent, or about $57 million, with the state picking up the rest.
The state Legislature is expected to take up the mid-year budget proposal within the next few weeks; the proposed wage cuts, for the 2004-2005 fiscal year, will be determined later.
Shirley Smith, a 62-year-old South Central Los Angeles resident, is now paid $765 a month to take care of her 70-year-old husband, who suffers from polio and is confined to a wheelchair. The funds allowed her to quit a longtime job as a teacher’s assistant.
Under the proposed cuts, she would no longer receive the money, although her husband would be eligible to receive continuing services from someone else. But it could force Smith to attempt to re-enter the work force.
“I really don’t think it’s right,” Smith said. “The government started this program and now that a lot of people are in it they want to cut it back.”
Joel Bellman, a spokesman for Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who has championed the workers’ cause on the board, said the county is pushing local legislators in Sacramento to oppose the cuts, because the county would have a hard time replacing the funds.
