Care Industries
Labor Center Projects
Care Industries Overview
Developmental Disabilities Research
Home Care Research
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Contact: Carol Zabin
Phone: (510) 642-9176
Email:
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The Labor Center has undertaken a pilot project to increase
wages and improve benefits and career opportunities for low-wage direct
care workers providing services for people with developmental disabilities
in the Bay Area. Mostly women of color and/or immigrants, the average
wage of workers in the sector is less than $10 an hour and less than
a fifth are provided health benefits by their employer. Stakeholders—including
employers, advocates, consumers, labor, researchers, and policy analysts—widely
recognize that poor compensation for direct service workers has led
to severe staffing shortages and high worker turnover, which in turn
undermines quality of care for consumers and ultimately the viability
of the community-based service delivery system. Substantial policy
work and coalition efforts have emerged from this common analysis,
and provide the key building blocks necessary to construct a “high
road” sectoral partnership to implement changes that can help
stabilize the workforce, increase access to training and provide opportunities
for career advancement.
The Labor Center is working with stakeholders, including SEIU, to
plan a pilot sectoral partnership bringing together multiple service
provider agencies and other stakeholders. The goal of the project
is to design a labor-market intermediary that brings employers together
for worker recruitment, training and benefits. This stakeholder-driven
partnership will create a unique but replicable opportunity to implement
best practices in job matching and training, and will change the quality
of the jobs that workers are placed in and trained for. Reform of
this sector will serve as a model for building high road partnerships
in other human services in California and nation-wide.
Child Care Organizing: Out of the Box. The Labor
Project for Working Families, in partnership with the Labor Center,
is convening a series of dialogues among child care leaders to push
forward new visions for child care organizing in California. A day-long
conference called "Child Care Organizing: Out of the Box"
held January 9, 2003, sought to engage unions and community-based
worker groups in strategic thinking around organizing strategies for
child care workers and come to agreement on common set of principles,
plan of action, and structure for future work.
» Conference Report 
Research on the Human Services Workforce. The Labor Center
is working with practitioners to identify key research needs and carry
out research and policy analysis on issues confronting the human services
workforce. Recent work in this area included a legal brief and expert
testimony for the landmark Sanchez v. Johnson case, in which a group
of developmentally disabled adults allege that low wages for care
providers in California violate civil rights by keeping individuals
with disabilities unnecessarily institutionalized in California's
developmental centers.
» Legal Brief for Sanchez v. Johnson
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