(Cross-posted from The COFAR Blogsite)
It apparently took the threat of a major strike, but the Connecticut Legislature passed a bill and the Connecticut governor signed it earlier this year to raise the minimum wage of direct-care workers in that state’s Department of Developmental Services system to $14.75 an hour, starting January 1.
A similar effort fell short last year in Massachusetts when a budget amendment to raise direct-care wages to $15 was killed in a budget conference committee in the Massachusetts Legislature.
While Governor Charlie Baker signed separate legislation in June to raise the minimum wage across the board in Massachusetts to $15, that wage level won’t actually be reached until 2023. The minimum wage will rise to only $12 next year, whereas it will be close to $15 in Connecticut for human services workers as of January 1.
It seems that even though legislators and the administration of Governor Dannel Malloy in Connecticut are equally as tolerant of runaway privatization as they are here in Massachusetts, the Connecticut Legislature and governor have shown a greater recognition that increased privatization has resulted in low wages for direct care human service workers, and that low wages have had a negative impact on services.
In May, after the Connecticut Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of setting the minimum direct-care wage at $14.75, Malloy made a statement that we have yet to hear Governor Baker make:
“For far too long,” Malloy said, “the people who provide care to our most vulnerable neighbors have been underpaid for their critical work.”
In fairness to Baker, Malloy made that statement only after 2,400 employees of nine corporate provider agencies in Connecticut voted in April to authorize a strike that was set to begin in early May. The workers in Connecticut are represented by the SEIU 1199 New England union.
Clearly hoping to avert that strike, the Malloy administration proposed raising the minimum wage for human services workers to $14.75 an hour and providing a five-percent raise for workers earning more than $14.75 an hour effective January 1.
The Malloy administration’s proposal, which was endorsed by the SEIU union and ultimately signed into law, applies to 19,000 union and non-union caregivers that staff some 170 group homes and other nonprofit agencies that receive Medicaid funding in Connecticut, according to The Connecticut Mirror.
As Connecticut Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney noted:
The work (those caregivers) do is among the most important in our state in terms of humanity. If we are to consider ourselves a humane and caring society, at long last we should begin at least to recognize the value of that work.
In Massachusetts, SEIU Local 509 helped organize a five-day strike for a living wage in July at CLASS, Inc., a DDS-funded day program provider based in Lawrence. The workers there were getting paid about $13 an hour and wanted a $1 increase. The company was offering an increase of only 40 cents.
The president of CLASS, meanwhile, was making about $187,500 a year, according to the state’s online UFR database.
In July, workers at CLASS, Inc. reached a settlement with management to raise the workers’ wages by 60 cents an hour. That would still leave the average worker there well below what direct-care workers will be earning in Connecticut.
The Massachusetts strike, moreover, didn’t have the impact on legislators and other policy makers here that the threat of the Connecticut strike apparently did in that state. Thus far, it isn’t apparent that there is any political will in Massachusetts to raise the minimum wage of direct-care workers to Connecticut’s level.
That is concerning because five years is a long time to wait for the minimum wage for direct-care workers to reach $15. Due to inflation alone, that $15 will be worth less to Massachusetts workers in 2023 than it would be if they were to receive it starting this January.
It’s nice to see a New England state legislate on the side of the working class. Maybe Massachusetts will follow suit one day. There was a time when we led the nation. In 1836 Massachusetts created the first state child labor law requiring factory children under 15 to go to school a minimum of 3 months per year.
Today, our legislators seem more focused on the “job creators” and giving them tax breaks…..
Side note: Even this morning, I heard Senator Barney Frank on WBUR referring to the wide and widening wealth gap in the USA that, according to him started in the 1980’s (but actually began in 1973 according to most economists) and said it was due to the fact that a number of Americans had “superior education and job skills” to take advantage of the growing economy.
This canard will not die.
If education and job skills were behind the widening wealth gap in the USA in the period of 1970-today, then we would expect that this gap was most pronounced between the 30% of us with college degrees and the 70% without. In other words, the massive wealth gap would have a clear line dividing us as “college educated and well off” versus “no college and poor”.
This is not the case.
The gap did not widen along the 30/70 line. It widened between the 99/1 line and even more pronounced between the 99.99/.01 line.
It has little to do with education and job skills and everything to do with political power.
I wonder if you can perhaps find and post a link to the piece you heard from Barney Frank (who was never a Senator, by the way). Barney Frank seldom makes mistakes of fact. I’d like to hear his words myself before commenting on your characterization of them.
The reason to make education and skill training available to those who can’t afford them has nothing to do with the obscene wealth concentration gap. It is instead driven by the stark and very pronounced disparity in wages and compensation between those who have such training and those who do not.
The obscene wealth concentration that you describe is very real and is our most immediate economic issue — the extreme wealth concentration is strangling our consumer-driven economy choking off the money supply for consumers.
The gap between those who have and do not have college degrees and job skills is pervasive and pronounced within that 99.99%.
In addition to voting Yes on 1 for nurses in MA</a, we shoul support the hard work of direct care aids like my sister who are underpaid, undervalued, and too often placed in unsafe situations. Thanks for bringing this to our attention Dave and I hope the MA legislature can start passing this kind of forward thinking legislation. ,