Frontline Caregivers: Still Struggling

Faced with cuts in programs and stripped of their bargaining rights, home care workers are trying to maintain the activist vigor of their scrappy past, which won union recognition and contracts from reluctant state authorities. FloraJohnson and her sister workers took heart from the Occupy Wall Street protests that swept Chicago this last fall. “We’re tired of these big banks and the rich people getting rich and poor people getting poorer. But we’re sending a message.” Her union members are even willing to go to jail for the cause. After all, their houses are not only homes but also their workplaces; without homes, there can be no home care workers and thus no fight for better work. This merger of home and work turns the foreclosure threat faced by other poor people into a particularly acute crisis.

As a nation, we seem to believe that only through cheap labor can we “afford” to provide long-term care. We think about the needs of recipients but not about those who do the work. The Great Recession and Republican ascendancy are shaking the very programs that made home-based services possible. Can we let these forces make life more precarious for all of us? A majority of Americans will at some point depend on a care worker, often one who has long labored in poverty and struggled to balance her own and others’ social needs. The absence of public support and labor standards may hasten the day when no one will be available to care.