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Direct-Care Workers in the News

November 14, 2013

Advocates for the direct-care workforce speak out for quality jobs for direct-care workers.

    • How Minnesota Could Solve Coming Home-Care Worker Shortage, a commentary published on MinnPost on November 14, suggests that both unionizing home care workers and creating worker-owned home care cooperatives are strategies that should be employed to address the projected shortage of direct-care workers in the state.
    • In Iowa View: How Much Do We Care about Care Providers?, published in the Des Moines Register on November 12, John Hale says that Iowa’s business and government leaders should make the challenge of building a stable direct-care workforce a priority.
    • PHI President Jodi Sturgeon responded to a Washington Times article, “Welfare-to-Work Law Encourages Low Wages, Raises Dependency on Government Benefits,” with a letter to the editor. Sturgeon points out that home care workers — not mentioned in the article — are paid low wages primarily through public dollars and then must rely on public benefits to make ends meet. She writes that this arrangement undervalues this essential workforce and recommends that the federal government and states should instead “increase reimbursement rates to support living wages and contract only with agencies that pay a decent wage to front-line workers.”

— by Deane Beebe

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