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union president Thérèse Duguay

Stultz eventually sat down with Duguay and a few other union representatives

the union and the Canadian Red Cross are currently in contract negotiations

The workers say that their contract, signed with the Canadian Red Cross and the department, is not being respected. Duguay says that there's a discrepancy within the transportation allowance. She says that they are only receiving 12 cents an hour for mileage and are asking the department to conduct an audit of the books of the Red Cross on such an allowance.

the Red Cross has not met a requirement of contracts with the Department of Social Development to give workers 75 per cent of transportation allowance money received from the department - the other 25 per cent covers program administration

base rate of $0.12 per hour but also $0.27 per kilometre

the reason for the split travel allowance is because it's not necessarily mileage travelled in a car and part of the care workers' job is to accompany the client to and from medical appointments and related events

the union has been in negotiations with its employer for better wages for almost 30 months

"When you compare this with people doing the same work in other provinces, the difference in wages is huge," she said. "For example, in 2008, in Nova Scotia, they received $15.62 an hour and in P.E.I., $19.19."

the NB Coalition for Pay Equity was supporting Duguay and the workers

But let's not be too hard on those economists. The rest of us don't pay that much attention to workers such as Shireen Luchuk either - not, at least, until our families need her. And not until someone such as Elizabeth Tracey Mae Wettlaufer is charged with murdering eight residents in Ontario nursing homes. Then we have lots of questions: Who is overseeing the care of our seniors? Are our mothers and fathers safe? Will we be safe, when we end up there?

The question we might try asking is this: If the care that Luchuk offers is so valuable, why don't we treat it that way? Dr. Janice Keefe, a professor of family and gerontology at Mount Saint Vincent University and director of the Nova Scotia Centre on Aging, says "the emotion attached to these jobs removes the value."

Caregiving, Keefe says, is seen "as an extension of women's unpaid labour in the home." Those jobs are still overwhelmingly filled by women. And, while times are changing, the work they do is still mostly for women - whether it's the widows needing care who are more likely to outlive their husbands, the working moms who need child care or the adult daughters who are still most likely to carry the burden of aging parents.

Yet it's as if society wants to believe that professional caregivers should do their work out of love and obligation - as if care would be tainted by higher pay and better benefits. That's an argument you never hear for lawyers and accountants. It's certainly not one that Adam Smith, the founding father of political economy, made for the butcher or the baker.

In last year's book, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, Swedish writer Katrine Marcal argued that the market, as Smith and his fellow economists conceived it, fails to accept an essential reality: "People are born small, and die fragile." Smith described an economy based on self-interest - the baker makes his bread as tasty as he can, not because he loves bread, but because he has an interest in people buying it. That way he can go to the butcher, and buy meat himself. But Smith missed something important. It wasn't the butcher who actually put the dinner on his table each night, as Marcal points out. It was his devoted mother, who ran Smith's household for him until the day she died.

Today, she'd likely be busy with her own job. But care - the invisible labour that made life possible for the butcher and the baker (and the lawyer and the accountant) - still has to be provided by someone. Society would like that someone to be increasingly qualified, regulated and dedicated, all for what's often exhausting, even dangerous, shift work, a few dollars above minimum wage. One side effect of low-paying, low-status work is that it tends to come with less oversight, and lower skills and standards. That's hardly a safe bar for seniors in residential long-term care, let alone those hoping to spend their last days being tended to in the privacy of their homes. We get the care we pay for.

It's not much better on the other end of the life cycle, where staff at daycares also receive low wages for long days, leading to high turnover. "I am worth more than $12 an hour," says Regan Breadmore, a trained early-childhood educator with 20 years experience. But when her daycare closed, and she went looking for work, that's the pay she was offered. She has now, at 43, returned to school to start a new career. "I loved looking after the kids. It's a really important job - you are leaving your infants with us, we are getting your children ready to go to school," she says. But if her daughter wanted to follow in her footsteps, "I would tell her no, just because of the lack of respect."

It's not hard to see where this is going. Young, educated women are not going to aspire to jobs with poor compensation, and even less prestige. Young men aren't yet racing to fill them. Families are smaller. Everyone is working. Unlike Adam Smith, we can't all count on mom (or a daughter, or son) to be around to take care of us. Who is going to fill the gaps to provide loving labour to all those baby boomers about to age out of the economy? Right now, the solution is immigrant women, who, especially outside of the public system, can be paid a few dollars above minimum wage. That's not giving care fair value. It's transferring it to an underclass of working-poor women. And it doesn't ensure a skilled caregiving workforce - all the while, as nurses and care assistants will point out, the care itself is becoming more complex, with dementia, mental illness and other ailments.

Ideally, in the future, we'll all live blissfully into old age. But you might need your diaper changed by a stranger some day.

Maybe robots can do the job by then. Rest assured, you'll still want someone such as Luchuk to greet you by name in the morning, to pay attention to whether you finish your mashed-up carrots. When she's holding your hand, she will seem like the economy's most valuable worker. Let's hope enough people like her still want the job.

an
$84 billion, largely for-profit industry

Although a few states have extended some wage and hours protections to homecare workers, these workers enjoy no federal right to form a union or bargain collectively

Caring Across Generations campaign

the campaign’s collaborators spanned the community/labor spectrum, from AFSCME and the SEIU to 9 to 5, the Alliance of Retired Americans, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the YWCA

Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Association

Her group, mostly employers, goes to rallies, signs petitions and gives testimony in defense of caregivers because, as she says, “My quality of life depends on their quality of life.”

Caring Across Generations, like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, aims to build relationships between those doing the work and those they’re working for.

200 groups were signed on as campaign partners

argues for cuts to the defense budget, imposing financial transaction taxes and increasing corporate taxation

CAG is fighting to expand Medicaid and Medicare, and to protect Social Security and healthcare spending too.

Despite industry complaints that paying minimum wages will drive up the cost of care, CAG and its allies flooded the Labor Department website with positive comments. Since the public comment period closed on March 12, the group has been waiting with bated breath. The department has sixty days to review, after which the Office of Management and Budget has ninety days, and then the rules should go into effect

Since summer, local Care Councils have formed across the country, bringing people on all sides of the care equation together to fight budget cuts and attacks on union rights, and for increased funding for homecare. The councils have planned public Care Congresses in key cities

Homecare, after retail and nursing, is the third-fastest-growing workforce in the United States. But organizing has been slow and sometimes cutthroat

Jennifer Klein, who with Eileen Boris has written a book on organizing homecare

the workers are variously defined as public workers (employed by the state and paid through Medicaid) or independent contractors (working for private agencies) or they may be hired directly by the client

After 74,000 mostly Latina homecare workers in Los Angeles voted to join the SEIU in 1999, the labor movement celebrated—and then fell into a bitter turf war between the SEIU and the state, city and municipal employees’ union, AFSCME, over how California’s remaining homecare workers should be contracted and represented.

In contrast with traditional unions and movement leaders who have prioritized short-term legislative, ballot-measure or electoral campaigns, intersectional organizers emphasize building power over the long term

National Nurses United, does worry about simply going along with the trend toward homecare. “Obviously, we want people to have choices, but it can’t be driven by budgets,” she says. “As nurses, we’re still seeing the blowback from the deinstitutionalization of mental care.”

in several states where they represent caregivers, unions have created a registry of potential clients for their members

These services, which are delivered by private companies or non-profit organizations but funded primarily by government requisitions on a per client basis, have been targeted by pay equity programs over the past three years because wage rates are barely above minimum wage.

The coalition is made up of 650 individuals and 83 organizations that educates and advocates for the adoption and the implementation of adequate legislation in order to achieve pay equity - equal pay for work of equal value - for all workers in both the public and private sectors.

Sure, provincial governments legislate a minimum wage. But it doesn’t pay enough to help someone working full-time, year-round pay the basic bills.

PSWs have a role standard  which says “personal support workers do for a person the things that the person would do for themselves, if they were physically or cognitively able”.

There is a great deal of variation around the kind of care PSW’s provide, with some PSWs providing medical care such as changing wound dressings and administering medication, and others providing  ‘only’ personal care such as bathing, transfers from bed and housework. What PSWs can and cannot do varies based on their training, supervision and employer policies.

An estimated 57,000 PSWs in Ontario work in the long-term care sector, 26,000 work for agencies that provide community and home care, and about 7,000 provide care in hospitals.

Changes to the Long-Term Care Act in 2010 outlined a minimum standard of education for PSWs working in that sector specifically.

PSWs working in long-term care homes are required to work under the supervision of a registered nurse or registered practical nurse

Some have suggested that rather than standardizing education for PSWs, more standards should be put in place around PSW supervision, scope of practice and work environment in long-term care and community agencies.

92% of PSWs are women, and many work at multiple part time jobs, involving a great deal of shift work.  PSWs are often paid minimum wages with few benefits.

Community colleges, continuing education programs and private career colleges offer courses or programs of varying durations, with no standardized core curriculum across the programs. There is no single body in Ontario that monitors the quality of these programs.

a PSW Registry to collect information about the training and employment status of the nearly 100,000 PSWs in Ontario

Long-Term Care Task Force on Resident Care and Safety

“a registry is a mechanism of counting and it doesn’t ensure anything about quality, preparation or standards.”

in the past two months there have been stakeholder consultations around educational standards for PSWs

Catherine Richards, Cause for Concern: Ontario’s Long Term Care Homes (Facebook group)

“PSWs have high expectations put on them but very little support to do their jobs.”

In my opinion, what we need most is a ministry (MOHLTC) that will demonstrate leadership by clarifying the role of the PSW in long-term care, nursing homes, hospitals and yes, home care, and to consistently enforce high standards of care

PSWs should feel able to rely on consistent supervision and clear guidance from registered nursing staff and management, yet from my observation there is a lack of communication between PSWs and RPNs/RNs in a long term care home setting, and rarely in my experience is honest communication encouraged to include patients/residents and families. In home care, PSWs have even less support or supervision which should concern people.

PSWs are rarely afforded the time to properly perform the necessary tasks assigned to them and they often bear the brunt of complaints

it is the leadership that must accept the bulk of responsibility when PSW care standards are low

Ombudsman oversight would provide an immediate and direct incentive to elevate care standards

In Nova Scotia, a registry was put in place for Continuing Care Assistants (the provinces’ equivalent to PSWs) in 2010 which has been used to communicate directly with CCAs as well as keep track of where they work. In addition, the registry provides resources and the development of a personalized learning plan to help care givers who do not have the provincial CCA obtain further training. British Columbia has also recently introduced a registry for Care Aids and Community Support Workers.

CUPE addresses these issues in Our Vision For Better Seniors’ Care: http://cupe.ca/privatization-watch-february-2010/our-vision-research-paper

having someone help you bathe, dress, eat and even wash your hair is as important as the medical care

I have worked in a Long-Term Care Facility for four years and have many concerns

it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that some point of care is being neglected

need to have more PSW staff on the front line

“it is like an assembly line here in the morning”

I don’t think these people are getting the dignity and respect they deserve.

We want to stop responsive behaviours, we need to know what triggers are. what is the root cause

We can’t do this with having less than 15 mins per resident for care.

I also believe that registering PSW’s will eliminate those who are in the career for just the money.

I have been a PSW for 8 years

Every year they talk more and more about residents rights, dignity ect ect … and yet every year, residents have been given less one on one time, poorer quality of meals, cut backs on activities and more than anything else, a lessened quality of care provided by over worked PSW’s.

Residents have floor mat sensors, wheelchair sensors, wander guard door alarm sensors, bed alarm sensors and add that to the endless stream of call bells and psw’s pagers sounding, it sounding like you are living inside a firestation with non-stop fire

they do not provide the staff to PREVENT the resident from falling

bell fatigue

This registry is just another cash grab

Now, it will be that much easier to put the blame on us.

When we do our 1.5hrs worth of charting every night they tell us to lie and say we have done restorative care and other tasks which had no time to do so they can provide funding which never seems to result in more staff.

for the Cupe reps reading this. You make me sick. Your union doesn’t back us up in the slightest and you have allowed for MANY additional tasks to be put onto psw’s without any increase in pay.

In the past year alone our charting has become computerized and went from 25mins to 1.5hrs. We now provide restorative care like rehab workers and now are officially responsible for applying and charting for medicated creams, not to mention the additional time spent now that prn behavior meds were discontinued and restraints removed created chaos

when your union reps come into meeting with us to “support” us, they side with our managers

about this registry

my sister works for 12 dollars H in Retirenment home

she has over 40 Residents

you should work in Long Term Care then, you will make a few buck more, still have 30-40 residents but at least you have a partner. On the other hand though, unlike retirement homes, for those 30-40 people, you will be dealing with aggressive behaviors, resistive residents, dementia, 75% of your residents will require a mechanical lift, you will have 1-2hrs worth of charting to do on top of your already hectic work load which they will not provide you more time to complete it, so only expect to get one 15min break in an 8 hr shift and often stay late to finish your charting.

As long as retirement homes are privily own they will always be run under the landlord and tenant act. That’s why they can work you like a dog and get away with it.

My 95 year old Dad is in LTC.

PSW’s simply do NOT have time to maintain, let alone enhance seniors’ quality of life.

there are NO rules or regulations about what the ratio of PSW staff to residents “should be”

quality is more than assistance with daily hygene, feeding, dressing, providing meds, getting people up in the morning, putting them to bed in the evening

psw’s are not only caregivers/ nurses we r also sometimes ONLY friend

The solution to our problem begins at the top, and this all seems very backwards to me.

Personal support workers are one of the back bones of the health care system.

Eleven years later, and nothing has changed? Something’s wrong here!

But I will not let this discourage me from taking the course, because no other job I’ve had has even come close to being as rewarding or fulfilling

is to many P.S.W in Ontario,and is not respect for them

Too many PSW’s are working as a Casual Employee

The pay is better in Long Term care as we know but PSW’s work for that extra few dollars more an hour

Most of us enjoy the field but more work has to be done to take care of your PSW’s and a pat on the back is just not going to do it.

administration has to stop being greedy with their big wages and start finding more money to invest in your front line, the PSW

Of those surveyed some statistics are worth repeating: 43 per cent were paid less than minimum wage, 52 per cent did not receive overtime pay, 61 per cent did not receive public holiday pay and more than 20 per cent of respondents were owed wages.

No, exploitation is not "cultural"

The Importance of The Fight for 15 and Fairness for Immigrant Workers

No Future for Labour without Real Solidarity with Immigrants and Migrants

Like supporting the call of migrant workers for status, supporting The Fight for $15 and Fairness is a step towards building genuine solidarity across racial and ethnic lines. 

The result is that many PSW actually earn less money now than they did before they received the government-mandated "pay raise." "We have received widespread complaints of our members losing clients and losing hours of work," says Miranda Ferrier, president of the Ontario Personal Support Workers Association, which has 21,000 members. Overall, there are about 34,000 PSWs working in the home- and community-care sector in Ontario. Ferrier says she has raised the issue with provincial health officials with not much success, noting the problem is worst in northern and eastern Ontario. "Clients are not receiving as many hours of care as before the pay raise," she says. For example, an elderly client at home may now get just one shower a week, rather than two.

Personal support workers are trained, licensed front-line health-care professionals whose duties include dressing, bathing, toileting and transferring patients, especially the elderly. They also provide emotional and physical support as well as companionship to isolated patients who are still living at home. "As caregivers we are all here because we love what we do and we care about people and want to help them," one PSW from eastern Ontario wrote recently in an email. "We are the ones with them from the beginning to the end. We are the ones holding their hands and providing comfort as they are dying. We are the ones feeling the pain of loss. We are the ones who leave heartbroken and crying for our client as they suffer and pass away. "The emotional toll this takes on us no one sees, yet we do it all again because we love what we do. We wipe our tears and put on a smile and go to our next client.

We deserve better and our clients definitely deserve better." She's right because treating low-paid workers so shabbily is a disgrace. It's time the Wynne government took steps to ensure that its well-intentioned pay raise truly does mean more income, not less, for PSWs who deserve better. Bob Hepburn's column appears Thursday. bhepburn@thestar.ca

Their recommendations included the ambitious goal of reducing poverty in Saskatchewan by 50 per cent by the end of 2020. To reach such a goal requires putting in place a policy with the power to do so, and the group came to the consensus that a basic income pilot project would be an effective and achievable means of doing so.

Sound expensive? A growing body of evidence shows that allowing poverty to continue is far more expensive than investing to help improve people's economic well-being. Currently $3.8 billion - 5 per cent of GDP - is lost from the Saskatchewan economy each year due to increased health and social costs and decreased economic opportunities. In Ontario, this cost of poverty has been calculated to be upward of $30 billion per year - far more than estimated costs of basic income implementation.

Where more extensive basic income pilots have been tried, both internationally and in Canada, the results have been impressive. The Mincome experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s resulted in higher school completion rates, and a reduction in hospitalization of 8.5 per cent largely due to fewer accidents, injuries and mental health admissions. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Canadians spent $63.6 billion on hospital services in 2014, meaning a decrease of 8.5 per cent would result in savings of $5.4 billion. This is just one of the many areas where the return on social investment saves public funds, improving the lives of Canadians in the bargain. Some policy changes happen slowly, with incremental movements in public opinion. But every once in a while, an idea that had seemed outside the realm of possibility quite suddenly gathers momentum. The concept of basic income is on a course from the margins to the mainstream. If political leaders have the health of Canadians as their first priority, they'll turn advice into action and implement basic income.

Danielle Martin is a family physician and vice-president of Medical Affairs and Health System Solutions at Women's College Hospital. Ryan Meili is a family physician, founder of Upstream: Institute for A Healthy Society and an expert adviser with the Evidence Network.

Twenty-seven thousand in Los Angeles. More than 25,000 in progressive Portland. Eight thousand in conservative Dallas. Sanders, a 74-year-old "democratic socialist" with little regard for traditional campaign requirements such as smiling, has drawn the biggest crowds of any candidate from either party. Calling for a "political revolution," Sanders has overtaken favourite Hillary Clinton in the first two voting states, Iowa and New Hampshire. Last week, he announced the feat that finally got America's money-talks political class to take him seriously: he raised $26 million (U.S.) over the past three months, just shy of Clinton's $28 million and better than Barack Obama over the comparable period in 2007.

He collected that cash while refusing to hold swanky fundraisers - or many fundraisers at all - and while railing against the corporate titans whom candidates usually ask to write cheques. The haul came largely from grassroots donors who contributed online. The average donation, his campaign said, was $30. Brad Cooley, a 19-year-old computer science student at Arizona State University, had never heard of Sanders until he came across his name this spring on Reddit, where Sanders has amassed a zealous following. Cooley now gives Sanders $5 every month. When he has some spare cash, he chips in another $10 or $15.

"He's the only politician that's ever made me excited for politics or for being part of the political activity in this country," Cooley said. Every Democratic primary produces a liberal alternative to the establishment choice. None - not Bill Bradley, not Howard Dean - has offered a platform nearly so ambitious. Sanders, a two-term Vermont senator elected both times as an Independent, is pushing the kind of unabashed big-government agenda that Canada's NDP might deliver if it set up shop in the United States and evicted all its centrists. And he is doing it with unrestrained anger. Though he is a career politician, he radiates an anti-establishment rage that resonates in the era of stagnant middle-class wages, growing income inequality and billionaire-backed Super PACs.

His crusty sincerity is especially appealing to voters who believe the cautious Clinton is inauthentic in her professed concern for "everyday Americans." In substance and in style, he is exposing Clinton's weaknesses. "Bernie is talking to the middle-and-below guy that is just screwed, and nobody else is really addressing what's happening to them," said Peter von Sneidern, 70, a retired motorcycle shop owner and the former party chair in the New Hampshire town of Temple. Sanders calls income inequality "the great moral issue of our time." He says he would pursue a Scandinavia-style universal health care system, make public universities free, double the federal minimum wage to $15, spend $1 trillion over five years to repair infrastructure, break up big banks and change the Constitution to curb the campaign clout of "the billionaire class."

Like conservative critics of Donald Trump, Clinton supporters say Sanders would get eaten alive by opposition operatives in a general election. "I know that the (Republican) Karl Rove team has one goal in mind, and that's to get Bernie the nomination. Because he's their dream candidate to run against," said Bert Weiss, the Democratic chair in the New Hampshire town of Chatham. The drama-hungry media can make Sanders' chances sound better than they are. Among the non-white voters particularly important in the South, Clinton leads 76 per cent to 16 per cent, according to a recent NBC poll. And Clinton's overall lead, while shrinking, is still large: Clinton is ahead of Sanders 65 to 35 per cent, a recent YouGov poll found.

Dan Payne, a Boston-based Democratic analyst, said the upcoming debates are a "big, big hurdle" for a candidate he describes as "rude."Nelson believes Sanders is unlikely to do much better than his current 30-odd per cent of the national vote. "But he's already had an impact. He'll have a major speaking role at the convention, and he's already pushed the agenda." Sanders's fervent fans - the Reddit soldiers and the New Hampshire retirees alike - are convinced he can win. Cooley cites Obama, who trailed Clinton by a similar margin at this time in 2007. Von Sneidern cites Jesus Christ.

"Somewhere," von Sneidern said, "I saw something that said, 'Somebody thought that a socialist Jew couldn't get anywhere? Well, you celebrate his birthday every December.'"

Bernie Sanders, who considers himself a "democratic socialist," has passed Hillary Clinton in the first two voting states, Iowa and New Hampshire.