Home Care Unionization Efforts Beginning To Tick Back Up
Home Health Care News / By Andrew Donlan
The home care workforce has traditionally been a tough one to organize. But efforts have ramped up over recent years, leading to more workers opting into unions across the country.
Recently, University of Rochester Medicine Home Care (URMHC) workers “overwhelmingly” chose to join a labor union. They aligned themselves with 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, which is one of the largest health care worker unions in the country.
About 115 URMHC workers – across multiple counties – will now join the union, looking for better pay, working conditions and more say in day-to-day operations.
More broadly, after a strike at the University of Rochester Medical Center last year, more than 1,600 home health aides and personal care attendants joined unions in Rochester and in the broader New York State, according to FingerLakes1.com.
Unionization in home care
Because home care workers are remote, they remain one or the least unionized groups of health care professionals in the country.
“We don’t want this kind of third party interference between employers and employees, but there’s a tension that’s happening in this system,” Denise Delcore, then a part of the law firm Polsinelli, said in 2022. “Home care providers have had greater challenges than we’ve ever seen before. As employees are struggling to deal with those — particularly in the wake of COVID — there’s a renewed effort to organize this industry.”
Part of what URMHC workers want out of unionization is better pay, which is a problem for most home-based care providers that accept Medicaid or Medicare.
While providers do set wage rates, those wages are largely determined by reimbursement from state-sponsored programs. Therefore, leaders may want to raise wages, but don’t always have the vehicle to do so…
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