Banded Together: Economic Democratization in the Brass Valley

8. Taking Care of Business

8. Taking Care of Business Starting a business was one thing; making it work—especially making it work as a participatory, employee-owned company—was quite another. ValleyCare had to recruit its workers and train them. It had to support them to perform effectively in a wide range of home settings, often with difficult clients. It had to handle all the complexities of managing a firm in the modern service economy. Like any business, it had to stay in the black. But it also had to realize the ambitious social goals for which it had been established. ValleyCare’s approach was a response to conditions in the industry it was entering. Home care was notorious for irregular work and an unstable workforce . Doreen Filipiak, a home-care worker and single mother who helped to found ValleyCare, observed that home care is a business with high labor turnover: “When I was in it, there just weren’t enough hours to go around, and if you need a full time job, you can’t live on maybes. I can’t tell you how many times I would show up at work in the morning and not have a patient, because they’d been taken to the hospital the night before, or they’d passed away in the night.”1 ValleyCare aimed to succeed in this environment by pursuing two linked goals: to provide high-quality jobs and to provide high-quality home health care. Its founders believed that these goals were synergistic. In a field marked by low pay, irregular hours, and disrespect for workers’ needs, high-quality jobs would attract high-quality workers and merit their commitment. That in turn would make for far better care than was usually provided by the casualized home-care industry. As a for-profit company, ValleyCare aimed to perform in the market in competition with other companies. At the same time, it had other goals fundamentally different from simple maximization of profit. Its goals could be synergistic or conflicting—or both. How their relationship played out shaped every aspect of daily life in the employee-owned company. I got to see how all this worked out in practice when the ICA and VCC asked me to do interviews and produce a slide show about the newly opened company.2 From hanging out in the office, I got a strong sense of camaraderie among the employees. From visiting the homes where aides gave care, I saw how demanding the work could be for aides and how important it could be for patients. I also got a strong sense of the aides’ commitment to their patients and the reciprocal appreciation their patients often had for them. From observing and talking with both workers and managers, I observed the respect with which workers seemed to be treated in the day-to-day operation of the company and how much effort managers made to run the company in a way that correlated to their needs. The slide show ended with ValleyCare staff members doing a rousing impromptu rendition of the then current pop hit “Taking Care of Business.” “These Are the Nurturers . . .” Home health care is a people-based business. It depends first of all on recruiting , selecting, and training the workers who provide its services.3 Theresa Francis, a veteran of the buyout effort at Century Brass who became an active member of the committee that founded ValleyCare, stated that, from its beginnings, VCC’s mission was not only to “serve the community that doesn’t generally get the care” but also to “provide jobs with the same community that didn’t have the jobs.” VCC’s founders selected several of Waterbury’s poorest neighborhoods as target areas for employment: “We hope to provide employment opportunities to low-income people especially those living in Berkeley Heights, a public housing project with 350 families, 98% of whom are Black; in the North End of Waterbury, a predominantly Black neighborhood where the 1980 census estimated that 25%of the residents live below the poverty line; St. Cecilia’s Parish [and] the South End, a predominantly Hispanic area plagued by poverty and unemployment.”4 The NVP had been involved in organizing projects in all of these areas. The project worked hard to recruit employees as well as clients through member parishes. Its years of connection to the surrounding community and layers of prior organizing were critical to the recruitment effort’s success, a fact not lost on VCC’s outside evaluators...