UNION WORKERS FIGHT FOR JUSTICE
'Invisible no more': Home health aides strike
By Mary Owen
New York
An impassioned cry for a living wage echoed
through the cavernous streets of midtown Manhattan on June 7 as
over 20,000 home health aides began a three-day strike for
higher pay, health insurance, sick leave, pensions and other
benefits. They are members of 1199 Service Employees
International Union. Their union has launched an "Invisible No
More" campaign to build broad public support for their
struggle.
Chanting "We're overworked and underpaid!" and, "They take
the money, we do the work!" the surging mass of home health
aides--overwhelmingly women of color, many of them from Africa,
Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, the Middle East and other
parts of the globe--marched past the offices of subcontractors
who have refused to increase their pay and benefits.
On the first day of the strike, their strength and
determination had already won a contract at five home care
agencies. But when the union leaders at the rally recommended
ending the strike, the workers refused, roaring their approval
for staying out two more days to support workers whose agencies
hadn't settled.
New York's home health aides, many of them single mothers,
provide life-sustaining home care for the elderly, disabled and
convalescent, allowing patients to avoid costly and isolating
nursing home stays. Yet the aides are paid only $6 or $7 an
hour without benefits. Profit-hungry subcontractors keep the
bulk of the $18 per hour that Medicaid and Medicare pays for
this service.
"Many of the government contractors and their subcontractors
pay their executives hundreds of thousands of dollars a year,"
reported the New York Times. (May 3) These same contractors
claim they cannot afford to pay home health aides the $10 per
hour with paid vacation, sick time and benefits that the union
is demanding by 2006.
Home health aides also face long commutes of up to four
hours, multiple commutes to tend to several patients, and a
constant struggle to be assigned full-time hours. Some home
health aides live in homeless shelters, unable to locate
housing they can afford on their $12,000 to $14,000 per year
incomes. Moving stories and photos of some of the women appear
on the union's web site:
www. invisible no more. 1199seiu. org.
"I work close to 40 hours if you include travel time, but I
only get paid for the 20 hours I spend with my patients.
Raising a son on $140 a week is pretty much impossible," says
home health aide Intesar Museitef, 32, a Palestinian
immigrant.
"My agency doesn't give me any health benefits or anything,
and I can't miss a day of work because the agency will just
give my patients to someone else," says home health aide
Beatrice Whitehead, who came to the United States from
Guyana.
The home health aides' struggle is about economics--but, as
in the recent strike to defend health benefits by 70,000
immigrant California grocery workers, it is also about justice.
1199 SEIU has amassed a long list of supporters for this
struggle, including labor unions, community organizations,
religious leaders, entertainers and elected officials.
"There is more at stake here than just the financial issue
of low-paid workers," 1199 SEIU President Dennis Rivera told
the Daily News on April 25. "There is also a moral issue:
Should we allow those on whom we rely to provide assistance to
our loved ones to live in poverty and deprivation?"
In his landmark 1986 book "High Tech, Low Pay," Workers
World Party founder Sam Marcy wrote that as capitalism ravages
the living standards of an increasingly multinational working
class, "it lays the objective basis for the politicization of
the workers, for moving in a more leftward direction and for
organization on a broad scale."
Pointing to a recent New York hospital workers' strike, he
wrote, "That the hospital strikers are more politically
conscious and a more militant element of the working class can
easily be verified by even a chance acquaintance with
them."
Today that is certainly true of New York's home health
aides, who are courageously striking for economic and social
justice. They deserve full support. For information, news
coverage, testimony by the workers and ways to support the
strike, go to www.invisiblenomore.1199seiu.org.
Reprinted from the June 17, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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