SEIU Local 775 home-care workers stage a December rally at the Capitol.

By Erik Smith

Staff writer/ Washington State Wire

OLYMPIA, Jan. 27.—The Service Employees International Union, one of the state’s feistiest public-employee unions, is testing the waters for an initiative that would fight back against cuts to the state’s home-care programs.

            Among other things, it would reinstate Initiative 1029, the home-care training measure passed by voters in 2008 and which the Legislature never got around to funding.

            But that’s just the start. It also would require the Legislature to fund home-care programs based on medical evaluations of clients, not on the amount of money the state has to spend. It would impose new auditing and reporting requirements. Annual medical assessments would determine if clients’ needs had changed.

            And the cost? Maybe $100 million a year.

            That’s the gist of a phone poll now being conducted among Washington voters. And while SEIU hasn’t made an announcement of any sort, Washington State Wire learned of it Wednesday night from the best of all sources.

            A pollster called this reporter at his home.

            Signals Different Approach

            There’s been plenty of talk from labor this year about some sort of an initiative. Jeff Johnson, president of the Washington State Labor Council, said two weeks ago that the umbrella union organization is considering an initiative to roll back business tax breaks – perhaps as much as $3 billion worth.

            But it wasn’t firm, and the Labor Council still hasn’t decided whether to move ahead.

            If the questions in the poll are any guide, it seems that SEIU is considering taking a whack at tax breaks, too, but on a much smaller scale, and for a single purpose.

            The poll asks voters what they think of a series of tax ideas. Among them:

*   Repealing the first mortgage tax break for banks.

*   Repealing the personal-property tax break on airplanes.

*   Imposing the sales tax on cosmetic surgery.

*   Continuing a 5-cent-a-bottle beer tax that is scheduled to expire in 2013.

*   Raising the state sales tax rate from 6 percent to 6.15 percent.

Reflects Dismay With Legislature

There was no way to contact the union in the wee hours Thursday morning, but the story is clear enough. SEIU Local 775 organized the state’s 40,000 home-care workers over the last decade, and it finally won a closed-shop bill in 2009 that forced the last stragglers to join the union and start paying dues. But it’s all been downhill from there.

The home care workers really aren’t considered state employees, at least in a traditional sense. Many of them are sons and daughters who take care of ailing parents, or parents who care for disabled adult children. They get a stipend from the state, and the arrangement saves the state about two-thirds over the cost of nursing home care.

 The union’s big victory came just as the state was hit by recession. Since then SEIU has been rebuffed in salary negotiations, and when the case went to arbitration and the union won a pay raise, the state promptly said no, on the grounds it had no money. Wages have been flat for five years. Health care benefits have been cut. The governor slashed home care hours 10 percent on Jan. 1, although an injunction last week forced the state to restore half of them while an SEIU challenge makes its way through the courts.

And the union’s big victory at the polls with I-1029 turned to dust when lawmakers and the governor refused to launch the big state training program it required. No money for that, either.

So what the Legislature won’t do, the initiative will.

Questions Outline Strategy

The poll asks a series of questions testing responses to arguments for and against the initiative.

It doesn’t name SEIU specifically, but one of the questions notes that the initiative is “sponsored by the union representing home care workers.”

            The pro-initiative arguments include the fact that home care is a low-cost alternative to nursing home care, that it allows the infirm to remain in their homes, and that home care workers have taken a 15 percent cut.

The anti-initiative arguments include just about every bit of invective that has been hurled against the union by its critics in recent years, including the argument that the program “would cost $100 million a year that the state doesn’t have.”

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