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For Personal Care Assistants (PCA) like Patsy Gibson, the symbolism of being Black in the United States and having a 1.5x holiday pay for the first time on Martin Luther King Jr day is not lost on her. Improvements for an overlooked gendered and racialized profession are the results of unionization with Service Employee International Union (SEIU) Healthcare Minnesota. Home care workers like PCA’s are one of the few fields that are growing in Red Wing where Gibson lives. However, these positions and gains are continuously threatened by well funded national anti-union groups.
Gibson moved to Red Wing 7 years ago after being born in Mississippi and raised in St. Louis. In her words, “Minnesota is very loving, very kind.” Gibson soon settled into work as a caretaker of her apartment building. To make ends meet, she eventually leveraged her passion for taking care of people to find employment at a nursing home. Gibson eventually left, concluding that her young supervisors were too dysfunctional in meeting patients’ needs. “They were not taking care of them the way I thought they should,”she said. Nevertheless, she continues to visit the senior citizens she came to know.
Gibson was not intending to become wealthy by being a PCA; the extra needed money only offers her a little bit of relief. It does not sustain a career. She explained that the low pay means that turnover is high and to maintain the job, “you have to get into it ‘cause you love what you are doing.” The stability of her current client who has a prosthesis has been especially gratifying. She had to leave a previous client since in Gibson’s words, “Her mouth and me did not get along.”
While Gibson is more financially stable than in the past, her dream of owning a home feel out of reach without more regular hours and increased pay.
The Minnesota House Health and Human Services Finance Committee appears to agree with Gibson.
A comprehensive report released Thursday, January 11th by the Republican-controlled committee indicates worker shortages in the care industry amid increasing growth and openings. Data compiled in the report shows that “PCA vacancies increased the most of any occupation in Minnesota over the year, by 3,300 openings.” The report cites improved pay and benefits for other contingent positions such as cleaning and food service as a primary reason for less interest in PCA positions citing the following as barriers:
“There are several aspects of PCA jobs that create barriers to people working in and staying in the field.
• The majority of PCA positions are posted as part-time.
• The median wage is well below the cost of living wage (see table below).
• Many PCA positions require a working vehicle, especially in Greater Minnesota.
• Very few PCA positions, including full time positions, offer health insurance.”
According to data from the State Office of Employment and Economic Development in Southeast Minnesota counties, jobs with the most significant openings are part-time and do not require a college education. Without a college education, PCA work is one of the better jobs Gibson can hope for, since in her analysis, for people of color, “we find it hard to get a job unless you have been educated.” Ultimately, job growth is bundled into contingent jobs disproportionately impacting women and people of color. According to a 2016 report from the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute nationally:
“• About 9 in 10 home care workers are women, and their median age is 45.
• While people of color make up one-fourth of the total U.S. workforce, they comprise more than half of the home care workforce.”
More than half of home care workers have completed no formal education beyond high school. Because home care is often thought to require little education, experience, or training, it is an accessible occupation for workers who encounter educational or language barriers when seeking employment.
Gains earned by PCA workers like Gibson remain tenuous as SEIU continues to fend off attacks from well funded anti-union organizations.
Almost a year ago in February 2017, the state Bureau of Mediation Services ruled that the decertification efforts by PCAs affiliated with Minnesota PCA (MNPCA) lack sufficient merit and thus dismissed them. MNPCA is backed by the Center for the American Experiment; an anti-union think tank that in the past has supported right to work legislation. Attorney Doug Seaton represented the decertification petition.
In mid-2017 Seaton was under consideration by the Trump administration for a seat on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). According to reporting in Politico, Seaton is an infamous union buster. Locally, Seaton was hired by the Wedge co-op during unionization efforts. Bloomberg reported that Seaton’s tactics against unions are perceived to be too extreme even for a Trump administration struggling to appeal to unions. In earlier legal challenges, anti-union PCA’s were represented by William Messenger, an attorney for the National Right to Work Legal Foundation.
Attacks against SEIU aren’t limited to the courts. On January 5, 2017, after four months of negotiating a tentative agreement was reached. Seaton gave testimony at hearings demanding that they vote down wage and benefit improvements for Homecare workers. Despite the agreement, the legislature cut funding in half, resulting in renewed contract negotiations that ended with ratification on June 20th, 2017. SEIU hopes to fully fund the contract to the original negotiated levels in the next legislative session.
SEIU organizing has gained meaningful improvements. Gibson knows explicitly that her leadership in the organizing means that, “The ones that come behind are reaping the benefits.” Gibson’s hope for future improvement resonates with Dr. King’s vision and legacy. In celebrating the achievements of a celebrated figure, it is common that King’s critique of poverty and exploitation are ignored. Dr. King was assassinated while in Memphis to support AFSCME sanitation workers. Furthermore, many note that at the time of his assassination he began to speak out more forcefully against US incursions in Vietnam. King linked the killings of the Vietnamese to the decimation of Black communities in the United States.
During a speech entitled, “Beyond Vietnam- A Time to Break Silence”, given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4th, 1987 King explains
“ I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”
King’s widening perspective and analysis radicalized his politics.
Like King, Gibson has a message for those that look to fight the gains made by unionized PCA’s, “We cannot stand in the same spot forever, you have to want something more for your fellow man.” She has been frustrated by what she feels are lies and the reversing of important gains; “let’s have some honesty and integrity for a change, fight for the cause.”