------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the June 17, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
"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 Service Employees International Union/Local 1199. 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. Local 1199 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," Local 1199 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.
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