The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Group homes feel toll as strike looms
Workers and operators of the state’s private group homes for developmentally disabled adults endured a day of maddening frustration along with some hope Wednesday as a strike set to start Monday began to tally real costs.
And taxpayers are feeling the expense — now, not next week. Preparations for the strike have already started, and will cost at least $700,000 even if a strike is averted, mostly for training replacement workers.
On the year’s first summer-like day, those replacements arrived at some of the nine nonprofit agencies facing a strike by 2,400
SEIU District 1199 health care workers. The cost of each replacement worker: as much as $50 an hour.
So the meter is running. Starting Monday, a strike would cost state taxpayers $1 million a day. That’s a hefty bill for a problem that has a fix for $22.5 million, a fix that happens to make sense.
Most frustrating of all, many of these workers, 19,000 in all, including non-union group home employees, earn just a few dollars above the minimum wage and their agencies have had no net cost increases sine 2004.
Just about everyone agrees they need a raise, and yet it falls short in the General Assembly year after year.
“Their reluctance to actually deal with reality and the facts, it’s amazing to me,” said Barry Simon, CEO of Oak Hill Inc., the largest of the agencies, with about 75 group homes along with day programs and schools around the state.
The state House of Representatives approved a plan Wednesday to bring all group home workers up to at least $14.75 and boost those above that by 5 percent — after Republicans tried to kill it in place of a “fair” 1 percent hike for all private nonprofit providers across all state agencies.
No Democrats favored the 1 percent solution because, as Rep. Mike D’Agostino said, a 10-cent raise is not a real solution for workers earning barely more than the minimum wage. The final House had nine of the 72 Republicans joining every Democrat.
Now the Senate isn’t likely to vote until Friday at the earliest because of its rules, as strike prep carries on. Oak Hill faces a walkout by 800 of its employees and is training 300 replacements, Simon said. To fill all his shifts, he can close schools and move managers.
Simon and others showed anger toward Republicans blocking the fix, some of whom have spoken in soaring language about serving the state’s neediest residents. “Their ability to conveniently argue one way at one time and then suddenly change their minds is pretty disheartening,” Simon said.
The numbers tell part of the story. Median pay for workers at the unionized Whole Life Inc., with 33 group homes, was $15.58 an hour 20 years ago, Executive Director Sheila Cordock said. Today’s median at the same agency: $15.80.
That means her workers have lost about a third of their buying power to inflation. Back then, the minimum wage was $5.65 an hour. Today, it’s $10.10.
“People are working at McDonald’s making French fries for $15 an hour,” said Maria Torres, a program aide at a Whole Life group home on Infield Street in Bridgeport, one of six the agency runs in the Bridgeport area.
A single mother, she makes $15.25 an hour after four years in the job, and only has 35 hours in shifts that mostly run for four hours at a time because of her low seniority. A colleague makes $17 an hour as an assistant manager after 25 years on the job.
As she finished her morning shift getting residents ready for a day program in Bridgeport, she wondered whether to blame her employer, which pays her and her colleagues under a contract with the state.
“I don’t want to point the finger at Whole Life,” said Torres, a program aide for the last four years, “but geez . ... You’re being overworked and underpaid.”
Let’s be clear: This isn’t a normal strike, and the employers could not be more aligned with the workers preparing to picket.
“If we were paying enough,” said Cordock at Whole Life, “we would be able to have less overtime and people would stay with us longer. Right now it seems we’re constantly training new employees.”
Torres, 31, is on Medicaid — “state medical,” as it’s known — along with her 11-year-old son. Her income qualifies her, and her odd shifts make it hard for her to find other work. Why does she stay with it? The hard work is fulfilling, more than serving up greasy food.
The upshot: This is hardly an efficient way to run a state, regardless of where anyone stands on spending. You can’t let a group of low-wage workers go a decade without new money, period.
Republicans, including an angry House GOP Leader Themis Klarides, R-Derby, said the problem is that the money isn’t in the budget.
“It is not all about pulling on our heartstrings. We all understand how important these workers are and the people they take care of,” Klarides said, shouting. “This condescending tone … is something this state is not going to tolerate . ... When are you going to get serious in this building about where we’re getting our money from?”
Sen. Len Fasano, RNorth Haven, the Senate GOP leader, had said he wanted to see the contracts for the nine agencies and Ben Barnes, the governor’s budget czar, initially balked at that but later delivered the contracts.
The fate of the bill in the Senate, split evenly between the parties and with at least one wavering Demcorat, remains unclear.
Simon and Cordock, the private agency heads, said they’re running out of magic to hire and keep workers at the lower wages. Oak Hill, for example, raises money privately to bring pay levels up — but, of course, social service donors are stretched thin these days.
The real inequity is that state employees doing essentially the same work, in some places for the same SEIU 1199 union, make between $21 and $30 an hour with better benefits, often with abundant overtime.
It shouldn’t have come to the day when replacement workers were on the scene at a huge added cost to taxpayers. SEIU already postponed an earlier strike deadline in the hope that lawmakers would act.
“Hopefully we’ll get something settled because at the end of the day this is people’s lives,” said Torres, the Bridgeport aide. “Clients and workers.”