Low-Wage Workers Deserve More From Nonprofits

To the Editor:

Having a job is the goal of most every adult in America. A job provides true security: a steady income for food and shelter, access to health insurance, and the essential intangibles of identity and self-respect.

Yet as The Chronicle’s coverage of low-wage human-services workers illustrated (“Service Charities Seek Ways to Help Their Lowest-Paid Employees Get By,” May 3), millions of jobs in America do no such thing. Many of the jobs our economy is creating today offer only part-time hours, few benefits, little training—and less respect. They are clerical, retail, and restaurant jobs, and include even essential health and social-service jobs, such as personal-care and home-health aides.

Among these, the fastest-growing jobs are in home care, now employing more than 1.8 million workers nationwide (more than the number of elementary-school teachers). In fact, personal-care aides and home-health aides are the two fastest-growing occupations in America—projected by the U.S. Department of Labor to add 1.3 million net new positions this decade, a top-of-the-charts 70-percent increase. This is stunning, since home-care aides already account for one out of every 12 low-wage workers in America.

These jobs are central to our economy, but they are also important to each of us personally—for they are held by the individuals who are often essential to helping our loved ones live independently at home as they age or become disabled.

Unfortunately, most of those new 1.3 million home-care positions are likely to be of poor quality: Home-care aides earn on average $9.40 an hour, hours are often part time and episodic, training is minimal, and nearly 50 percent live in households that rely on public benefits like food stamps. Ironically, despite serving the health-care system, a third have no health insurance.

And throughout the coming decade in America, these types of poor-quality occupations will continue to expand. Of the top 10 U.S. occupations slated to contribute the most jobs this decade, three require no more than a high-school education, and five require less than a high-school education.

In response, policy makers, work-force specialists, and foundations working to improve the employment prospects of low-income people have focused primarily on “building career ladders”—that is, helping low-income workers climb out of those poor-quality jobs as fast as possible. While that is a very important strategy for a number of low-income workers, it is one that simply can’t defy the math: There are far too many low-income workers, attempting to climb toward far too few “good” job openings.

So, what can be done?

In the absence of good jobs, make bad jobs better. In addition to building ladders for the few, raise the floor for many.

Cooperative Home Care Associates, a nonprofit in the South Bronx that employs nearly 2,000 home-care aides, is one organization that has made that goal central to its strategy.

Octavia Martin, who previously worked for a home-care agency that did not guarantee hours and provided no benefits, says her new employer, Cooperative Home Care, is entirely different.

“At Cooperative, I have a steady income—at least 40 hours every week—health insurance, personal days off, and I know who to turn to when I need help.”

Instead of part-time employment, which is common among its competitors, Cooperative Home Care assigns aides to maximize full-time work; it also provides health insurance for many of its workers through its union affiliation; and it trains its own entry-level workers through twice as many hours as the minimum 75 hours required by law. Cooperative Home Care also employs “peer mentors” and trains its supervisors to be coaches rather than disciplinarians. One result is that Cooperative Home Care’s annual turnover rate is half the industry average.

Of course, these remain relatively low-paying jobs, and so public-policy reforms are still essential.

New York State has taken a huge first step, targeting a higher minimum wage for home-care workers—requiring, by 2014, $10 an hour, plus health benefits, for home-care workers in New York City whose salaries are paid by Medicaid. At the federal level, the Labor Department has proposed regulations to offer minimum wage and overtime pay protection to home-care workers, many of whom are, remarkably, now excluded under federal law.

Similar strategies are possible in other low-wage industries—and advocates in the restaurant and day-labor sectors are engaged in parallel efforts. Therefore, public-policy makers and foundations have a critical role to play: Any work-force training funds invested in low-wage industries should be targeted solely to those employers who are pursuing full-throttle strategies to both build ladders and raise the floor—forging bad jobs into better jobs for hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers.

Steven L. Dawson

President

PHI (Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute)

Board Member,

Cooperative Home Care Associates

New York

Clara Miller

President

F.B. Heron Foundation

New York

Corinne H. Rieder

Executive Director & Treasurer

John. A. Hartford Foundation

New York

Your article missed the main point that a fundraising-related publication is uniquely qualified to make: Instead of helping employees sign up for food stamps as part of their new-employee orientation, nonprofits should be speaking with their individual and corporate donors about the importance of providing equitable pay for the agency’s staff. They should not merely accept what is received from the state and make do.

What board member could proudly say, “At the agency on whose board I serve, we sign our full-time employees up for food stamps because we pay them so poorly that they qualify.”

I suspect that most board members at such charities are not aware of this practice and would be appalled to learn of it. Any agency run by a board proud of such statements would make a good candidate for investigation by the state’s attorney general because such an attitude does not show solid fiduciary responsibility.

Donors demand efficiency in their charities, but do not expect the charity’s staff to live in poverty to accomplish it. Donors value conversations in which pay structures are honestly explained and health-care costs are discussed along with information about the number of clients served and the requisite anecdotal story showing how their donation is making our world better.

The donors I have worked with don’t want high-level administrators getting rich, but they do want the people doing the work of the agency to have a living wage, health care, and the opportunity to retire someday.

We in the nonprofit sector do not help our cause when we repeat simple formulaic answers such as “90 percent of our income goes directly to help people.”

Simple statements like that contribute to the problem by dumbing down a nuanced conversation into a sound bite, and we owe our donors better.

So-called watchdog groups that rate a charity based on the percentage of its income spent on various categories, while well intentioned, further contribute to the problem.

If we are honest, all of us who have worked in the nonprofit sector know of cases where charities use rather aggressive accounting techniques to classify everything possible as a program expense so that a watchdog group will rate the organization better.

Watchdog groups would do better to accomplish their missions by taking a more holistic view of a charity’s impact by including the value of health care, retirement benefits, and salaries provided to the workers of the charity when they assess the charity’s efficacy and efficiency in improving our world.

Would not everyone be better served if these groups rated a charity on how good of a place it is to work and how good of a neighbor it is in its community, in addition to other more traditional metrics? Many for-profit businesses are rated by their watchdog groups on these quality-of-life metrics. Nonprofits should not be held to a different standard.

Next, as a tax-paying citizen, I wonder whether a charity that pays its employees so poorly that they are forced to rely upon government aid is really worthy of tax-exempt status. Is that nonprofit doing more to help make our society better, or is it contributing to the problem by keeping its full-time workers in poverty?

At least a for-profit business that underpays its staff is contributing tax money to provide the safety-net programs for its poor employees. A tax-exempt agency is not even doing that much.

The IRS should take this metric into consideration when evaluating an agency’s tax-exempt status.

Nonprofits, after all, are supposed to be more efficient than our for-profit counterparts because we do not have to pay shareholders and not because we rely upon food stamps to feed our workers.

The Rev. Carl W. Davis

Development Director

Center for Conflict Resolution

Chicago

Mr. Davis’s views are his own and not necessarily those of his nonprofit.