In March, Sue Williams-Ward took a brand new job, with a $1-an-hour increase.
The employer, a house well being care company known as Collectively We Can, was paying a premium — $13 an hour — after it began dropping aides when COVID-19 security considerations mounted.
Williams-Ward, a 68-year-old Indianapolis native, was a faithful caregiver who bathed, dressed and fed shoppers as in the event that they have been household. She was recognized to entertain shoppers with a few of her personal 26 grandchildren, even inviting her shoppers alongside on charitable deliveries of Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas hams.
With out her, the town’s most weak would have been “misplaced, alone or mistreated,” mentioned her husband, Royal Davis.
Regardless of her husband’s fears for her well being, Williams-Ward reported to work on March 16 at an residence with three aged girls. One was blind, one used a wheelchair, and the third had a extreme psychological sickness. None had been identified with COVID-19 however, Williams-Ward confided in Davis, not less than one had signs of fatigue and shortness of breath, now related to the virus.
Even after a colleague on the evening shift developed pneumonia, Williams-Ward tended to her sufferers — with out protecting tools, which she instructed her husband she’d repeatedly requested from the company. Collectively We Can didn’t reply to a number of telephone and e-mail requests for remark concerning the PPE out there to its employees.
Nonetheless, Davis mentioned, “Sue did all of the little, unseen, on a regular basis issues that allowed them to take care of their liberty, dignity and freedom.”
He mentioned that inside three days Williams-Ward was coughing, too. After six weeks in a hospital and weeks on a ventilator, she died of COVID-19. Hers is one among greater than 1,200 well being employee COVID deaths that KHN and The Guardian are investigating, together with these of dozens of dwelling well being aides.
Throughout the pandemic, dwelling well being aides have buttressed the U.S. well being care system by protecting probably the most weak sufferers — seniors, the disabled, the infirm — out of hospitals. But whilst they’ve put themselves in danger, this workforce of two.3 million — of whom 9 in 10 are girls, almost two-thirds are minorities and nearly one-third are foreign-born — has largely been ignored.
Dwelling well being suppliers scavenged for their very own face masks and different protecting tools, blended disinfectant and fabricated sanitizing wipes amid widespread shortages. They’ve usually finished all of it on poverty wages, with out extra time pay, hazard pay, sick depart and medical health insurance. And so they’ve gotten sick and died — leaving little to their survivors.
Talking out about their work circumstances in the course of the pandemic has triggered retaliation by employers, in response to representatives of the Service Workers Worldwide Union in Massachusetts, California and Virginia. “It’s been stunning, egregious and unethical,” mentioned David Broder, president of SEIU Virginia 512.
Each employee who spoke with Kaiser Well being Information for this text mentioned they felt intimidated by the prospect of voicing their considerations. All have seen colleagues fired for doing so. They agreed to speak candidly about their work environments on the situation their full names not be used.
Lack of protecting tools
Tina, a house well being supplier, mentioned she has confronted these challenges in Springfield, Mass., one of many nation’s poorest cities.
Like lots of her colleagues — 82%, in response to a survey by the Nationwide Home Employees Alliance — Tina has lacked protecting tools all through the pandemic. Her employer is a family-owned firm that gave her one surgical masks and two pairs of latex gloves per week to wash physique fluids, change wound dressings and administer medicines to incontinent or bedridden shoppers.
When Tina acquired the corporate’s do-it-yourself blueprints — to make masks from hole-punched sheets of paper towel bolstered with tongue depressors and gloves from rubbish baggage looped with rubber bands — she balked. “It felt like I used to be in a Third World nation,” she mentioned.
The house well being businesses that Tina and others on this article work for declined to touch upon work circumstances in the course of the pandemic.
In different workplaces — hospitals, mines, factories — employers are answerable for the circumstances wherein their workers function. Understanding the plight of dwelling well being suppliers begins with American labor legislation.
The Honest Labor Requirements Act, which types the idea of protections within the American office, was handed in an period dually marked by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal modifications and marred by the boundaries of the Jim Crow period. The act excluded home care employees — together with maids, butlers and residential well being suppliers — from protections reminiscent of extra time pay, sick depart, hazard pay and insurance coverage. Likewise, requirements set by the Occupational Security and Well being Administration three a long time later carved out “home family employment actions in non-public residences.”
“A deliberate choice was made to discriminate towards coloured individuals — largely girls — to unburden distinguished aged white people from the duty of employment,” mentioned Ruqaiijah Yearby, a legislation professor at St. Louis College.
In 2015, a number of of those exceptions have been eradicated, and protections for well being suppliers grew to become “very nicely regulated on paper,” mentioned Nina Kohn, a professor specializing in civil rights legislation at Syracuse College. “However the actuality is, noncompliance is a norm and the penalties for noncompliance are toothless.”
Burkett McInturff, a civil rights lawyer engaged on behalf of dwelling well being employees, mentioned, “The legislation itself could be very clear. The issue lies within the means to carry these corporations accountable.”
The Occupational Security and Well being Administration has “abdicated its duty for safeguarding employees” within the pandemic, mentioned Debbie Berkowitz, director of the Nationwide Employment Legislation Challenge. Berkowitz can also be a former OSHA chief. In her view, political and monetary choices in recent times have hollowed out the company: It now has the fewest inspectors and conducts the fewest inspections per yr in its historical past.
Moreover, some dwelling well being care businesses have categorised dwelling well being suppliers as contractors, akin to gig employees reminiscent of Uber drivers. This loophole protects them from the obligations of employers, mentioned Seema Mohapatra, an Indiana College affiliate professor of legislation. Moreover, she mentioned, “these employees are hardly ever ready to query, or advocate or foyer for themselves.”
Ought to employees contract COVID-19, they’re unlikely to obtain remuneration or damages.
Demonstrating causality — that an individual caught the coronavirus on the job — for employees’ compensation has been extraordinarily tough, Berkowitz mentioned. As with different well being care jobs, employers have been fast to level out that employees might need caught the virus on the fuel station, grocery retailer or dwelling.
Nonetheless, caregivers like Samira, in Richmond, Va., have little alternative however to work. Samira — who makes $8.25 an hour with one consumer and $9.44 an hour with one other, and owes tens of 1000’s of {dollars} in hospital payments from earlier work accidents — has no different possibility however to danger getting sick.
“I can’t afford to not work. And my shoppers, they don’t have anyone however me,” she mentioned. “So I simply pray each day I don’t get it.”
