Crisis after crisis is unfolding, yet this wrecking ball and his crew enjoy box seats at the World Cup while bombing neighborhoods in Iran and sending ICE goons into our own communities.
Yet another story gets lost in the chaos and terror of the Hateful Regime’s daily misanthropy.
Who’s taking care of our aging, frail, sick, disabled, dying, many of whom are often frightened, sometimes angry and unappreciative? Who’s bathing their clients/loved ones, changing adult diapers, supervising medications, and providing companionship in relationships that are intimate as well as professional?
Mostly immigrants. This compassionate care comes from people who have left Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Uganda, Jamaica, the Philippines, and dozens of other nations.
The jobs they take start at $20 an hour or less, and max out at around $25 for experienced people. Most readers will have encountered a care worker, and the operative word is “care” or “caring” or better yet, “compassionate care.”
They come in many forms, including nurses, aides, CNAs, DSPs, PSWs, and they are skilled, well-trained and kind. Generally, we see them as personal care attendants (PCAs).
Make no bones about it: care work is heavily funded by government. Few people can self-pay for these services. Hospice care is financed by Medicare. Long-term nursing home care is mostly reimbursed by Medicaid. Care that supports independent living for people with disabilities is funded by Medicaid or the VA. Home care is underwritten by myriads of agencies.
My own work – while teaching part-time college – included many forms of care work: Independent Living Program case worker for foster youth; as a house manager for adults with disabilities; as activities director for a memory care facility; as a job developer for clients with developmental disabilities; as a personal support worker signing on to navigate adults living in our communities; as case manager for veterans who were houseless, fighting addiction and looking for VA benefits.
I’d teach Shakespeare at night and assist clients with adult diapers and colostomy bags during the day. In Seattle, the icing on my cake was working with SEIU, the union that organizes workers, including care workers.
I’d met with compassionate, smart folk from Somalia, Nicaragua, Ethiopia and dozens of other countries. Spanish, Amharic, Somali, or other Afro-Asiatic languages were common. Seattle represents over 150 languages, and of course, that’s what makes the city amazing.
The sources of public funding are barely adequate to meet basic threadbare needs, and that grossly limits the room for better pay.
All that inadequate funding is under threat from Trump’s budget cuts as well as mass deportations.
In heavily Democratic Washington State, our labor movement strategy is to demand the state allocate larger budgets for reimbursements, typically through Medicaid. This barely translates into better pay. I organized workers directly. This strategy has had only limited success because of other financial demands on Medicaid.
This Epstein Class and its pied piper Trump are responsible for cutting deeply into the care workforce. ICE is deployed like shock troops/Gestapo, intimidating immigrant workers into self-deporting, even when they currently have legal work status.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently told an interviewer, “I went to a Dominican barbershop in Harlem, and the owner was telling me that everyone in the barbershop had legal status. And yet most of them were terrified of coming to work because they know that for so much of ICE’s operations, it has little to do with legality. It has to do with profiling, and it has to do with a vision of creating the largest deportation machine this country has ever seen.”
While we might be enjoying the last days of summer and preparing our kids and grandkids for school, the story of this crisis deepens. Trump’s regime has been chopping away at a legal immigration system called Temporary Protected Status. When this war monger’s second term began, TPS was protecting some 1.3 million people facing various perils in their home countries. However, Trump has already ended TPS for people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Liberia, Nepal, Nicaragua, and for most Venezuelans.
There has been pushback, yet immigration advocates are not optimistic. Stephen “Goebbels” Miller’s agenda is one of demonizing immigrants. Well, except for those white South Africans. The Supreme Court decided with Trump that targeting Haitians while favoring South Africans isn’t overtly racial.
It is obviously racist.
Ai-jen Poo, the founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the coalition Caring Across Generations, states:
“The end of Haitian TPS will be devastating for hundreds of thousands of families who rely upon Haitian care workers. Providers will close their doors, jobs will be lost—for citizens as well as immigrants. The entire industry was already buckling under the pressures of cuts to Medicaid, and high workforce turnover due to low wages. At a moment when the need for care is surging, particularly on the part of our growing aging population, we should be expanding and strengthening our care workforce, not gutting it with cruel and misguided policy.”
The warmongering, crypto-dripping and data center-loving Trump’s impact on this shortage of care workers hits both clients and the workers in different ways. The bottom line is families left to provide care are under more pressure juggling work and fulfilling this demanding home care.
To bring sanity back to our aging and vulnerable relatives, the first step is congress should revise the law so that admission of asylum seekers and refugees is mandatory.
Immigration is a civil matter, and ICE should be abolished permanently.
“Your voice matters for other working-class people to understand themselves as a political force that can actually transform society when organized,” Karina Garcia, VP candidate last go-round, said on how we can actually fight to end the ICE terror wreaking havoc in our communities.
The answer? Get organized.
America has plenty of immigrants who want to work in the care economy. We should welcome that workforce and pay them decently.
- First published at Lincoln County Leader.