Missouri home care victory conference - St. Louis, July 24, 2009
Building on Missouri voters’ approval last November of a ballot initiative to create the Missouri Quality Homecare Council, which has authority to negotiate with workers over wages and benefits, Missouri’s in-home care workers have voted by a landslide margin in favor of organizing themselves into the Missouri Home Care Union.
But even before the ballots were fully counted, a Missouri judge temporarily blocked certification of the unionization vote in response to a suit filed by a company to challenge the election process.
The Missouri Department of Labor and Industrial Relations reported on July 22 that the vote, conducted by mail-in ballot, passed 2,729 to 499. The new union, a joint effort by AFSCME and SEIU, will cover about 13,000 workers, making it the largest health care union in the state. It will include workers reimbursed by Medicaid but not those employed by private companies (“Missouri home care workers vote for union bargaining,” AP, July 22).
Threasa Bach, a home care attendant from Salem, said in a press release from the new union, “I’m thrilled. This is fantastic news for Missourians who need home care and for caregivers like me. The next step is to join forces with consumers to make home care better and available to more Missourians.”
Bob Pund, a disability rights activist living in Columbia, told The Columbia Daily Tribune that he was pleased with the election results because he “would like to see better working conditions for the people who do this job because it’s hard to get good employees,” Pund noted high turnover rates among workers due to a lack of benefits such as vacation time and workers’ compensation (“Home health workers hope union will improve care,” July 23).
But the day before the vote total was announced, Cole County Circuit Judge John Beetam issued a restraining order against the State Board of Mediation, which was counting the ballots, in response to a suit filed by Springfield-based Integra Health Care Inc. alleging that the election process had “lacked safeguards to ensure the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and wrongly excluded some eligible voters. The suit also accuses two boards connected to the election of violating state meeting laws” (“Mo. judge blocks certification of union election,” AP, July 23). A hearing date has been scheduled for August 4.
As reported by The Columbia Daily Tribune, “Earlier this month, the Board of Mediation had filed suit against Integra seeking enforcement of a subpoena for a list of workers who would be eligible to participate in the vote. That suit is pending” (“Vote certification for home health union blocked,” July 24).
PHI spoke to SEIU spokesperson Krissi Jimroglou in St. Louis to find out further details of the situation. “This was a democratic vote,” she said, “and to be included in it, Integra needed to supply that list. They denied first a request and then a subpoena. So they disenfranchised their own employees from a democratic process, and with their lawsuit they have delayed what all Missourians are pushing for, which is improving home and community-based health care services.”
She also told PHI that the passage of last November’s ballot initiative demonstrated that “there’s a hunger for improvement in home care in Missouri. Both home care attendants and the public realize that Missouri has a long way to go to ensure there’s a stable, professional workforce in place, and that’s why these workers, who make about $9 per hour, have no benefits, and have largely been relegated to the shadows, are so excited to step up to the plate and make their voices heard.”
She said a large victory rally was held by consumers and workers at a St. Louis senior center on Friday, July 24.
