How “Fair Pay for Home Care” Can Build a Caring Economy

About this session

New York is the epicenter of a national home care workforce crisis. Seniors and disabled people are forced to go without services, or worse, become institutionalized, because they cannot find adequate home care services in their homes. This disproportionately harms seniors and disabled people who are also people of color and immigrants, due to lack of adequate services hours and culturally and linguistically appropriate care. At the root of this crisis is the devastatingly low pay for the essential workers that provide home care, averaging $19,000/year and creating significant workforce shortages. 80% of home care workers in NY are people of color, over 69% are immigrants, and 90% are women.

A new report by the CUNY School for Labor and Urban Studies reveals that raising home care worker wages would help fill New York’s massive home care shortage by bringing 200,000 new home care workers into the field over the next decade, lift over 200,000 home care workers out of poverty wages, and generate $5.3 billion for the New York State economy by saving public spending dollars while generating increased tax revenues and boosting individual spending power.

This panel will include home care workers, consumers, home care agencies, as well as CUNY researchers to talk.