Article by Erik Smith. Published on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 EST.
Chalk it Up to Power of Union – House and Senate Budgets Launch New Program While Home-Care Workers Lose Hours, Health Insurance
SEIU home-care workers rally at the Capitol this session.
By Erik Smith
Staff writer/ Washington State Wire
OLYMPIA, April 19.—At a time when the state’s home-care workers are taking massive cuts in their hours and health insurance, the state House and Senate are providing millions of dollars to launch a long-delayed training program backed by their union.
You can chalk it up either to a crying need for classroom training or the political power of the Service Employees International Union, one of the most active public-employee unions in the state.
But no one in Olympia seems to think this one is an emergency – it’s more like the union is calling in napalm on its own position. The program will cost $10.3 million, about half of it from the state. Meanwhile those same home-care workers that are supposed to be helped are getting big cuts in their hours and health insurance. With the amount lawmakers are planning to spend on the training program, half of those health benefits could be restored.
Last December Gov. Christine Gregoire said the state didn’t have a dime to spare for the program. She pointed out the obvious to reporters last week: Lawmakers have only so much money. “They’ve got to take it from somewhere,” she said.
Enacts Initiative 1029
The money represents a partial launch for Initiative 1029, a home-care training measure backed by the union and approved by voters in 2008. The measure aimed to change the nature of home and residential care in this state, requiring every worker to take two weeks of classroom training, with a test and certification at the end. It was another step in the union’s effort to bring up a class of worker that really hadn’t been considered state employees until SEIU started organizing them in 2001. Many of those workers collect state checks for caring for their own relatives. Unionization brought somewhat higher paychecks and health benefits. It also brought a closed shop.
The initiative was supposed to further professionalize the field, but there was one big problem. I-1029 didn’t provide any money. Rather than raising taxes or diverting money from other state programs, it left that nasty little problem to the Legislature. The cost of the full program will be immense – $30 million from the state in the first two years, leveraging another $25 million from the federal government.
That’s just for the 40,000 home-care workers that are funded through public Medicaid programs. The requirements also apply to workers who serve private-pay patients through agencies and in residential homes, and also to those who advertise their services by tacking up cards on the bulletin boards at the local Safeway – even though they might not know it.
Private providers have been sounding the alarm ever since the initiative made the ballot. Cost will run about $1,400 a worker. Taxpayers might not notice, but in the non-Medicaid world, agencies and residential homes certainly will. It’s not as if $10-an-hour workers can shell out that kind of money, they say. Ultimately the providers say their industry will be strangled by the cost of training, lack of trained workers, lack of training programs, and possible state penalties for non-compliance. Home care will shift to the public sector, they say, where the taxpayer picks up the tab.
And they taxpayers ought to be just as fried that lawmakers would launch a new program in a year like this one.
“I am shocked and disappointed that the Legislature would choose to spend $10 million on additional caregiver training when so many essential services for children, the disabled and the elderly are being eliminated,” said Julianne Ferguson of the Washington Private Duty Association.
Bad Time for an Unfunded Mandate
No one could have known it back in 2008, but SEIU ran its initiative at pretty much the worst possible time. In previous years the $30 million might might have come from an ever-expanding state budget, and the biggest problem might have been a little grumbling from lawmakers. But Wall Street collapsed just before the 2008 election, and within a few weeks it became clear that the state was facing its worst budget crisis since the Great Depression. Lawmakers were billions of dollars short of the amount they needed to pay for existing state programs, much less an unfunded mandate that probably sounded good to voters at the time.
So lawmakers took a rare two-thirds vote in 2009 to suspend the initiative for a year. But they didn’t do it again last year, for political reasons. The new requirements quietly took effect Jan. 1. The Department of Social and Health Services and the Department of Health are in the ramp-up phase, but the rules haven’t taken full effect. Gregoire and others have been arguing there’s time to change course.
But now the budgets are out.
They make it clear that the union won its battle in the Legislature.
Others Come Later
The House and Senate budgets provide $5.3 million in state money for the program – substantially less than the $30 million in state funds a full rollout would cost. But the rest of it comes later. This time around, the rules apply only to independent providers who care for people other than their relatives, and to those who work for agencies. For everyone else, the rules are delayed for two years.
What’s most important, though, is that the budget offers a legislative thumbs-up for a program whose fate has been in doubt. And it shows that lawmakers are willing to treat the SEIU initiative differently than two other costly initiatives approved by voters with no money attached. Initiative 728, a class-size initiative, and Initiative 732, a teacher-pay measure, have been repeatedly snubbed by lawmakers during the current budget crunch. Lawmakers concede privately those programs may never be launched.
Asked last week for the public-policy reason for supporting the SEIU measure, state Sen. Ed Murray, D-Seattle, said, “We have people who are working with very fragile people who need training. It is significantly less than they would have liked, and it is a significant reduction, but that training is still important for people who work with very fragile people.”
If lawmakers are really concerned about home care workers, though, they have a funny way of showing it. The same House and Senate budgets cut home-care workers’ hours by 10 percent, at a time when most other state workers this year are getting a 3 percent cut. And about 6,000 state-funded home-care workers will get a 25 percent cut in their health-insurance benefits.
A False Choice, Union Says
Did the union choose its training program over the workers it represents? Certainly not, said the union’s Adam Glickman.
“We think it’s a false choice to pose training against services,” he said. “Rather than either providing caregivers with inadequate training or providing inadequate care to the most vulnerable, we should eliminate tax breaks so we can actually provide quality care to seniors and people with disabilities by adequately trained caregivers.”
It should be noted that SEIU seems ready to go to the voters a second time. It has filed an astonishing 13 initiatives with the secretary of state’s office on long-term care, and another six on education and welfare. Perhaps it hasn’t settled on the right approach for 2011, but it appears that it doesn’t just seek to reenact the training program – it’s also looking to restore cuts to hours and health insurance, at a total cost of over $100 million. And it may not make the same mistake this time – some of them also find a way to pay for it, by ending business tax incentives.
Held Their Noses
At a timeYou don’t seem to hear many lawmakers saying the new program ought to be a top priority when they’re throwing so many others over the side. Most lawmakers seem to be holding their noses. State Sen. Joe Zarelli, the Republican budget-writer who this year drafted the Senate budget with the Democrats, said it was just one of those things you have to accept in politics. It was in the House Democrats’ budget; Murray insisted on it, and there were more important battles to fight.
“Like I said, this is a budget where at some points I am biting my lip and at some points he is biting his lip,” Zarelli said.
On Monday, there was a spirited battle in the Senate when the budget came up for a vote. State Sen. Rodney Tom, D-Bellevue, proposed an amendment that would have redirected the money toward teacher salaries. “It makes absolutely no sense to me that we would go this direction when we are making a lot of very difficult cuts in education in this budget,” he said.
But in the interest of compromise, Democrat Murray and Republican Zarelli convinced members to vote no. And so the money for the program survives.
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