A Labor of Shove

What costs tens of millions of dollars, creates 26,000 new public employeescomplete with workers' compensation, subsidized health care, and raisesand is a key element in the passage of a state budget? It's the Service Employees International Union's (SEIU) new contract for home health care workers, and you probably helped bring it to life. Sixty-three percent of Washington's electorate made the contract possible when they voted in favor of Initiative 775 two years ago. Now critics are claiming the voters didn't know what kind of a monster they were giving birth to. Supporters scoff at that, saying that the difficult, vital work performed by home-care workers deserves far better than the current pay of $7.68 an hour with no health care benefits or compensation for injuries on the job. While the specific debate rages in Olympia, SEIU, already the largest and fastest-growing union in North America with 1.5 million members, is making a major impact on Washington's political and economic life.

On May 12, hundreds of SEIU members, wearing their trademark purple shirts, welcomed lawmakers back to Olympia for a special session to resolve an impasse over the size of the state's biennial budget and whether new taxes should be included to fund education, health care, and home health care. Standing outside the temporary state Senate building, the union members sang, to the tune of "Frere Jacques," "Dino Rossi, cheap and mean," to highlight their conflict with the Republican-controlled chamber and Rossi, the Issaquah Republican who chairs its Ways and Means Committee.

THE REPUBLICAN-CONTROLLED Senate had insisted since January that any new taxes would damage Washington's ill economy. They preferred a course of deep cuts in current programs to close the state's deficit. The GOP certainly had no intention of funding an expensive new union contract that creates many other obligations for the state. "We don't have enough money for it," says Rossi.

The Democrats, who control the state House of Representatives, spent most of the regular 105-day session quarreling among themselves over whether to raise taxes or not. Throughout the process, House Speaker Frank Chopp, D-Seattle, stood firm in his support for the home health care workers. Chopp says, "These workers are amongst the lowest paid in the state, and they are doing very, very important work." Claims Rossi: "It's Frank Chopp's number one issue. He'll keep us here to July or August to get this."

On May 15, House and Senate negotiators reached a compromise on the overall size of a state budget$23 billion dollarsand the amount of new revenue that will be includedaround $184 millionmostly by improving the collection of current taxes and imposing penalties for late tax payments. Now the House and Senate will negotiate the specific programs. Will the home-care workers' contract be included? On Tuesday, Chopp and the House Democrats told the union they had reached an impasse with the Senate Republicans over the new contract for the home health care workers. Chopp asked the union to return to the bargaining table and come up with a newpresumably cheaperproposal. "We're still fighting for it," says Chopp.

How did improving the lot of these particular workers become one of the top priorities of the state House's most powerful Democrat? One voter at a time.

THIRTY-THREE YEARS ago, the state of Washington and the federal government began a shared program to pay people to take care of the ill, disabled, and aged in their own homes. Home care makes a lot of sense. The clients prefer living in their own homes rather than being shipped off to nursing homes or other institutional settings. The government prefers it because it's more humane and cheaper than institutional care. In order to keep costs down and ensure client control over their caregivers, the government defined these workers as "individual contractors" rather than state employees. That way, the state could maintain a legal fiction that the clients were hiring thousands of owner-operated businesses to provide home care while the government was merely acting as the clients' "fiscal agent," passing along wages. Next year, the state Department of Social and Health Services estimates that there will be more than 26,000 so-called "individual providers" doing home health care work in Washington. According to the state's best estimate, more than 60 percent of workers who are caring for the aged or infirm are looking after a relative. The union says 85 percent of the workers are women. This is not really a surprise when you consider that home care was once unpaid labor performed mostly by women and, like other "hidden" female labor such as child care and housework, is undervalued economically in spite of its many physical and mental demands. All of these conditions make the home-care workforce ripe for organizing by the SEIU.

Although the SEIU was founded in 1921, in recent years it has redefined itself as both a new kind of union and a throwback to the labor movement's origins. It is innovative in that it wants to organize newly arrived immigrants and people doing "low-skill" work like janitors and child-care workers. At the same time, the SEIU wants to return unions to their roots as a social movement of the dispossessed who raise hell until they receive fair treatment. It embraces all forms of activism, including politics.