Homecare Worker Organizing in California: An Analysis of a Successful Strategy

Abstract

This paper examines the challenges facing California homecare workers in their historic struggle to unionize from the 1980s through the 90s. Three inter-related components were critical to their ultimate success: 1) grassroots organizing, 2) changing policy at the state and county level and 3) working in coalition with groups of senior and disabled care recipients. Now that the union represents more than 100,000 workers, consolidation of those victories involves challenges such as developing leadership among the new membership and strengthening the labor-consumer coalition that will be critical to further improvements in homecare services and working conditions. This campaign has already had significant impact on the structure of this emerging workforce, and will have long-term effects on social policy for care of the elderly and disabled.

New Turf for Organizing: Family Child Care Providers

“…with union issues. This position is strengthened if the union can get the consumers of the service to make these arguments (Delp & Quan, 2002).…”

“…According to Delp & Quan (2002), the keys to SEIU's success in California were: 1) grassroots organizing, 2) building effective coalitions with consumer groups and 3) changing state and county policies to establish public authorities as the employer of home care workers. Local 880's strategy in child care organizing shares the grassroots organizing strategy with the California campaign.…”

“…Grassroots intensive rank-and-file organizing was the foundation of success in the California homecare campaign (Delp & Quan, 2002). Organizers in California were delightfully shocked at how responsive the constituency was toward being organized.…”

“…Although creating coalitions with homecare consumer groups was not easy in the California campaign (it took enormous time and entailed working through suspicion and many differences), the payoff was enormous. The union alone did not have the power to pass state and county legislation necessary to create the public authorities to recognize the union (Delp & Quan, 2002).…”

“…This forced them to adopt an organizing/political strategy to pass state and county laws to establish public authorities as employers of record (Delp & Quan, 2002 & Clifford, 1989), and needs to assess whether quality of family child care is associated with unionization. If correlational studies find that unionization is associated with higher quality care, future studies could begin examining cause and effect relationships between the two.…”