“Every day, my family and countless others trust direct care staff to care for our loved ones. Yet we pay them less than we pay many of the college students brewing skinny lattes at Starbucks. Meager staff pay and benefits are the shameful back story of the generally positive effort to move intellectually-disabled people out of state institutions into the community. Starting hourly wages for direct care workers are typically a dollar or two above minimum wage,” says a piece in the widely read Huffington Post. The posting calls for paying direct-care workers “a living wage.”

In Think You Need a Raise? Caregivers for the Disabled Need One More Than You Do, Harold Pollack talks about Rayshawn, a direct-care worker at his brother’s group home in Chicago who, he says, his brother is “crazy about.”

Rayshawn and most of his colleagues, Pollack points out, are paid through Medicaid, “a program that bleeds red ink in just about every state. Our Governor’s proposed FY2009 budget again includes no cost of living adjustment for these workers. Nothing new or surprising there. Politicians are rewarded by powerful constituencies for good provided…. Direct care workers are not a powerful constituency, and they are pretty invisible to most voters.”

Elise Nakhnikian, Senior Online Editor
enakhnikian@phinational.org