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A superior court judge ruled on Dec. 2 that Washington State owes in-home caregivers nearly $100 million in back pay and interest.

The ruling could affect as many as 22,000 caregivers there, including home-care workers and paid family caregivers.

The workers filed a class action lawsuit against the state following its 2003 decision to reduce Medicaid payments by 15 percent to recipients who use live-in caregivers.

A 2007 State Supreme Court decision overturned the payment reduction, but did not compensate caregivers for the four years of lost earnings.

On Dec. 2, Superior Court Judge Thomas McPhee ruled that the state still had to pay caregivers a total of $95.6 million in back pay and interest for those four years.

The state plans to appeal McPhee’s decision.

– by Matthew Ozga

On November 8, voters in Washington State overwhelmingly passed a ballot initiative that strengthens training requirements for most newly hired long-term care workers there.

Workers will now undergo 75 hours of state-mandated training, a significant increase from the previously required total of 34 hours.

PHI first wrote about the ballot initiative last month.

– by Matthew Ozga

Washington State residents will be able to vote on a ballot initiative in November that will impose new requirements on home care workers for training and background checks.

The measure, Initiative 1163 (pdf), requires home care aides to complete 75 hours of training in order to become certified. The requirements also apply to aides working in most community-based settings, such as adult family homes.

Currently, the minimum requirement for training hours for Washington State home care aides is just 34 hours.

Initiative 1163 further mandates that all long-term care workers undergo state and federal criminal background checks before beginning their employment.

The initiative is similar to a 2008 initiative, which passed by an overwhelming margin. The earlier ballot initiative, however, was never implemented by the legislature because of budget shortfalls.

The measure is sponsored by SEIU, and is the focus of a social media campaign called Yes on 1163. The campaign also includes a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Supporters submitted 340,000 signatures in order to get the initiative on the ballot, nearly 100,000 more than necessary.

Initiative 1163 is one of five ballot initiatives that Washington voters will decide on next month.

– by Matthew Ozga

Seattle City Hall

The Seattle City Council passed a bill on September 12 mandating that businesses with five or more employees provide their workers with at least five paid sick leave days per year.

Employees who are sick, need to take care of a sick family member, or are victims of domestic abuse and need to take time off to assist law enforcement or go to court will be able to do so without putting their job in jeopardy, beginning September 2012.

Seattle companies that employ more than 250 employees will be required to provide nine sick days to their employees. The number of paid sick days is determined on a sliding scale based on the size of the company.

Seattle is now the third city in the nation that requires paid sick leave, following San Francisco and Washington, DC.

Connecticut is the first and only state in the nation to have passed paid sick leave legislation.

Low-Wage Workers Often Have No Paid Sick Days

More than 44 million workers across the nation do not have paid sick days, according to Families Values at Work, a network of 15 state coalitions, which also reports that:

• three in five personal health care workers do not have paid sick days,
• only 19 percent of low-wage workers have access to paid sick days, and
• one in six workers have been fired or threatened with being fired for taking time off work because of personal illness or caring for an ill family member.

Without paid sick leave, many direct-care workers — 45 percent of whom live in households earning below 200 percent of the federal poverty level (pdf) — have to make difficult decisions about coming to work ill and perhaps exposing their clients to germs.

Family Values at Work states (pdf) that paid sick leave policy is an “essential job retention strategy” because it:

• allows ill workers to care for themselves rather than lose their jobs;
• reduces the spread of disease to co-workers and consumers; and
• increases employer productivity.

Paid Sick Leave Efforts Elsewhere in the Nation

Elsewhere in the nation, mandated paid sick leave is gaining momentum, but in some cities the policy has already been thwarted.

Denver voters will have a chance to decide whether paid sick time should be mandatory on a ballot initiative in early November. And, according to a Seattle Times article, proponents of paid sick leave in “Massachusetts and elsewhere” are trying to pass legislation. The Massachusetts governor and secretary of labor are in favor of the policy, Forbes reported.

Milwaukee’s council members and mayor passed a paid sick leave bill in 2008, but it was overridden in 2011 by state legislators who voted to take away local government’s authority to regulate family and medical leave.

Philadelphia’s City Council also passed a paid sick leave initiative but it was vetoed by the mayor this summer.

– by Deane Beebe

Washington State Capitol building in Olympia

Home care workers were among the more than a dozen people arrested at the Washington state capitol on April 7 while protesting the proposed 16 percent state budget cut to home care services.

The home care workers recommend that the state fill the $5.1 billion budget gap over the next two years by closing tax loopholes and corporate subsidies instead of making more cuts to home care.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer political columnist Joel Connelly penned a column featuring three home care workers who were arrested at the demonstration. The workers explain what the cuts in hours will mean to their clients who are elderly or living with disabilities and in need of services to continue living in their homes.

Though the arrested workers expressed more concern about their clients than themselves in the column, as many as 6,000 home care workers who make an average of $10 per hour would see a reduction in the number of hours they work as a result of the proposed cuts, according to SEIU 775NW. They will also be asked to pay more for their health coverage, putting affordable coverage out of reach, the union says.

It is expected that the state House and Senate will not be able to reconcile the differences in their budget-slashing proposals — $4.4 billion and $4.8 billion, respectively — by the Easter Sunday deadline and will have to call a special overtime session to reach a budget agreement.

A national analysis of home care workers and health care coverage is available in PHI Facts 4: Health Care Coverage for Direct Care Workers, 2009 Data Update (pdf).

– by Deane Beebe

About 22,000 home health care workers in Washington State will be awarded $57 million in back pay, the result of a Thurston County jury decision delivered on December 20.

From 2003 to 2007, the Washington Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) made across-the-board 15 percent pay cuts to people with Medicaid who received care from a home care aide who lived in the consumer’s home.

The reason the state gave for what was called “shared-living-expense cuts” was that tasks performed by the in-home health aides, such as cooking, shopping, and doing laundry, were considered household services that the aides would be doing anyway, according to the Seattle Times.

“The state knew that many of these people had family, relatives, and friends who would take care of them no matter what,” Greg McBroom, who represented the workers, said in the Times. “They knew they could take advantage of them.”

In 2007, however, the Washington Supreme Court ruled that the cuts violated federal Medicaid law, which requires that all people with Medicaid benefits be treated equally. The state did not first assess the individual needs of each client as required by law.

Large Sum for Minimum Wage Workers

The workers filed a class action suit against DSHS in 2007, seeking the amount of pay that had been withheld over the years. The award is reported to be the largest damage award against the state.

“The jury, after hearing from both the workers and Medicaid beneficiaries, and from DSHS personnel who implemented the pay reduction, found that DSHS breached its duty of good faith and fair dealing with the workers,” McBroom said. “This case has always been about whether DSHS should pay for work it required these folks to do.”

“While the total recovery is very large, the award to the workers amounts to about $2,500, on average,” said Darrell Cochran, another attorney who represented the workers. “That $2,500 is a very large sum to someone making the minimum wage.”

The state is deciding whether to appeal the jury’s decision, according to Bloomberg News. A statement (pdf) released by one of the law firms representing the plaintiffs says that the state will “probably” appeal the jury’s verdict.

– by Deane Beebe