Thousands of home health care workers in Michigan voted to unionize in a tally announced Thursday.
The move comes after a state law passed a year ago reclassified individual home help caregivers as public employees for the purposes of collective bargaining. Those workers are often family members paid through state programs like Medicaid.
The legislation created the new Home Help Caregiver Council to serve as the employer for a union to bargain with.
Ruby Farmer has been caring for her son for 40 years. She joined the Service Employees International Union last June as the organization was pushing lawmakers to restore collective bargaining rights for homecare workers.
“It’s a voice for us. Something that we have been missing in the state of Michigan for homecare workers. From the past, they would tell us what we’re going to get based on what they felt that we did. Negotiating with the state, we can’t do that alone,” Farmer said Thursday.
Home caregivers briefly had a similar bargaining power under mid-2000s agreements with the defunct Quality Community Care Council. A 2012 state policy change ended that setup.
Gabriella Jones-Casey is with SEIU Healthcare Michigan, which would represent the caregivers. She said the previous union contracts led to workers getting higher pay, the creation of a worker registry, and other benefits.
“What was lost, most importantly was a vehicle … to meet the needs of the times, to be able to know what you need as a homecare worker, whether it’s training, whether it’s access to health care, improvement in wages,” Jones-Casey said. “Being able to have a vehicle, which is the union, by which to fight for those things, and to be able to win those things through a union contract is extremely important.”
Unofficial results show the vote passed with over 75% support, by a margin of 4,205 in favor of unionizing to 1,502 against. A spokesperson with the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity said there’s a five-business-day period for parties to file objections before the results can become official.
If the results stand, 32,000 home health care workers would join SEIU Healthcare Michigan.
Some of the workers opposed to that move, however, are suing to keep the unionization from happening.
The Mackinac Center of Public Policy is leading that lawsuit. Senior Attorney Derk Wilcox said the state can’t just label people as state employees for the sake of unionizing them.
“The state constitution specifically says that all employees of the state government go through the civil service. The civil service manages them and sets the terms of employment. And this is an attempt to bypass that,” Wilcox said.
The complaint cites language in Article 11, Section 5 of the state constitution, which details who counts as a part of the state civil service and falls under the Michigan Civil Service Commission’s purview.
Beyond that, however, Wilcox argued unionizing wouldn’t improve the lives of homecare workers and could create more hassle for them.
“Whether they choose to join or pay the union, the union still speaks on their behalf. And they’re going to be compelled to go to training sessions, where the union will be present and perhaps hosting, and be taught to care for their own family members. Which they’ve been doing all their lives, and they simply don’t think that they need to be shown how to take care of their loved ones,” Wilcox said.
The lawsuit is still playing out before the Michigan Court of Claims.
In the meantime, it remains to be seen what the union will focus on first in contract negotiations, though pay and training opportunities are some topics that have come up.
Farmer said it will come down to feedback the union hears from members. On the matter of deductions for union dues from wages, she said it goes to important causes.
“Union dues are part of the training, it’s part of the negotiating process, it’s part of getting you the benefits that you need. And it’s health care that we need, it’s a higher wage that we need. It’s respite that we need, it’s benefits as homecare workers,” Farmer said.
