Homecare worker organizing in California: An analysis of a successful strategy

This paper examines the challenges facing California homecare workers in their historic struggle to unionize from the 1980s through the 90s. Three inter-related components were critical to their ultimate success: 1) grassroots organizing, 2) changing policy at the state and county level and 3) working in coalition with groups of senior and disabled care recipients. Now that the union repre-sents more than 100,000 workers, consolidation of those victories involves challenges such as developing leadership among the new membership and strengthening the labor-consumer coalition that will be critical to further improvements in homecare services and working conditions. This campaign has already had significant impact on the structure of this emerging workforce, and will have long-term effects on social policy for care of the elderly and dis-abled. The economic and political influence of American labor unions hassuffered greatly over the past several decades, and one reason for this has been a steadily declining rate of union membership. Union members currently make up 13.5 % of the workforce, which compares to a high of 35 % in 1954. In 1995, the AFL-CIO launched a program to reverse this trend by prioritizing organizing of the unorganized, and encouraging af-filiated unions to spend at least 30 % of their budget on organizing. How-ever, in spite of significant efforts by some unions to recruit new mem-bers, union density has continued to decline (Bureau of Labor Statistics