Organizing Home Care: - School of Social Service Administration

Draft Paper Not for Citation or Quotation with Authors’ Permission 4/24/2007
salaries still hovered at the minimum and often included wage caps for long shifts.
Because of groundwork laid by the 1962 amendments, welfare administrators already had
articulated clearly how these different imperatives fit together. As Wilbur Cohen,
Assistant Secretary of HEW, had argued:
The opportunity for public welfare agencies to develop and
expand homemaker services to raise the level of living and
for ill persons, mentally retarded persons, and others should
directly utilize significant numbers of Negro women as
trained homemakers. The service aspects of the
amendments necessitate more caseworkers to provide
assistance and services and should result in the employment
of substantial numbers of additional Negro staff in public
welfare agencies. 70
OEO instantly took up the charge, disbursing grants along exactly these lines in such farflung
places as Madera County, California, and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. 71 “In
the ‘war on poverty’,” wrote Commissioner Winston, “homemakers have a crucial
role.” 72 OEO’s part in creating a low-wage service sector became even more pronounced
with the launching in 1966 of New Careers after the influential New Careers for the Poor
by Arthur Pearl and Frank Riesman. 73
New Careerists became nurses’ aides and hospital
orderlies, home health aides and attendants, and homemakers. For those directed into jobs
associated with domestic work or family care, however, the new career turned out to be a
lot like the old one. Evaluating New Careers, the National Committee on Employment of
Youth concluded that most of the sub-professional jobs were temporary and peripheral to
major service functions. Permanent ones were “low-paying, low-status, dead-end.”
Movement up the health care services hierarchy was impossible. “The more recently
developed jobs, such as home health aides, who provide outreach services, are usually