Missouri Home Care Workers Ask Governor to Raise Their Wages
About 100 Missouri home care attendants and their allies held a rally in St. Louis on October 7 to ask Gov. Jay Nixon (D) to raise their wages to $11 an hour.
The attendants spent much of the morning outside the Wainwright State Office Building, chanting “Governor Nixon, raise our pay,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Home care attendants Karen Harlen told the Missouri Times that most workers can’t make ends meet on their current wages. “We want this, we need this, we have to have this just to provide for ourselves and our families,” she said.
The rally coincided with the Home Care Workers Rising Summit, an event in St. Louis convened by Caring Across Generations to “focus on the growing national movement for quality care, quality jobs, and both care workers’ and consumers’ right to dignity and independence.”
In recent weeks, Missouri’s home care attendants have worked to rally support for the wage increase, which they argue can be accomplished without raising Medicaid reimbursement rates to state vendors.
The attendants currently earn an average wage of approximately $8.60 an hour.
— by Matthew Ozga
