Organizing Home Care: - School of Social Service Administration

Draft Paper Not for Citation or Quotation with Authors’ Permission 4/24/2007
Even as the welfare state location of the labor devalued the workforce, it opened
up a new site of social and political struggle. In 1973 a coalition of welfare groups, led by
the emerging Independent Living Movement among post-polio paraplegics, forced
Ronald Reagan to sign off on consumer-directed home care in California as part of
enabling legislation for SSI (Supplemental Security Income)—though California’s
creation of an independent provider mode for home care also confused the employment
relation and led to legal and political battles for over twenty years over who would serve
as the employer for collective bargaining purposes. Simultaneously in New York during
the 1970s, the civil rights movement among domestic workers led to union organizing of
household employees who had been transformed into home attendants, hired by both
non-profit and for-profit agencies. During the next two decades, senior citizens, the
disabled, their advocates, and unions built a coalition linking better working conditions to
better care. The demands of the receivers of care were central to re-organizing of the
service. These campaigns culminated at century’s end with massive SEIU [Service
Employee International Union] victories in New York, Illinois, and California that
marked a new unionism among immigrants, women, and people of color—characteristics
of the workforce that had reinforced the degraded status of the labor, its racialization, and
feminization in the first place. 98
In organizing home care, making what was private the
subject of political intervention, the state opened up the possibilities for home care to
become organized.