This blog post outlines the assistance offered by the recently-established Child Care Providers United California Workers Health Care Fund, summarizes recent findings from a David Binder Research/ California Health Care Foundation survey that underscore the need for this new health care investment for family child care providers, and discusses how the program will improve affordability for providers and benefit California as a whole.

Expanding high-quality ECE would not only generate economic output through the higher earnings of ECE workers, but would have an even greater impact on the state’s economy by increasing the employment, earnings, and productivity of parents.

The ability of homecare workers to choose to join a union and have dues deducted from their pay has led to important improvements in an industry historically marked by low wages and high worker turnover. The proposed rule would not only harm workers, it would have a deleterious effect on care quality and undermine the objective of home and community based services of providing seniors and people with disabilities a viable alternative to institutional settings.

Berkeley Blog post. Investing in the early care and education homecare workforces is essential for quality of care.

These workers provide a critical (but too often unrecognized) public good; as such, we argue that a significant public investment is a necessary part of the solution, both to deliver minimum wage increases to these workers and to cover the significant unmet need for care.

Unless California’s homecare crisis is addressed and workers’ wages are increased, the elderly and people with disabilities will not get the care they require, homecare workers will continue to live in poverty, and the public cost of long-term care will increase.

we describe a methodology we have developed for estimating the additional child care subsidy funding needed to cover the cost of a state minimum wage increase for programs administered by the California Department of Education (CDE) and the Department of Social Services through the CalWORKs 1 (Welfare to Work) program.

Berkeley Blog post. Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on Harris v. Quinn may seem like a narrow decision on the technical details of union dues. In fact, it lays bare one of the fundamental injustices to workers’ rights in the U.S., and a looming policy failure as the country struggles to care for a rapidly aging population.

This paper discusses the range of economic benefits that the early care and education (ECE) industry brings to California.

This report examines the current state of affairs in California’s programs serving individuals with developmental disabilities. The author assesses the advantages and drawbacks of the sector’s highly decentralized structure, and compares California alongside other states on various measures.

This paper, funded by the California Policy Research Center, was written by a multidisciplinary team of UC researchers from the California Homecare Research Working Group, who analyzed current studies that evaluate long-term care workforce needs in order to improve service delivery, with a particular emphasis on IHSS. Based on current research, we analyze the implications of the proposed cuts on the capacity of IHSS to provide quality care.

This report records the impact of the nearly doubling of wages for IHSS homecare workers in San Francisco County over a 52-month period. The project is based on a unique database, which matches approximately 18,000 San Francisco County homecare workers in 26,115 unique matches to 15,500 service recipients between November 1997 and February 2002.

Struggling to Provide is based on a recent survey of homecare workers in Alameda County that illustrates the insecure conditions in which many homecare workers live.

Expert testimony for Plaintiffs in Sanchez v. Johnson illustrating the connections between employee wages, working conditions, and the quality of care in the provision of services for the developmentally disabled