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CAROW examines how unions can help direct care workers
By Julie Greco
Unionized direct care workers – personal care aides, nursing assistants and home health care workers – are likely to earn more money and are more likely to have employer-sponsored health care insurance and pension plans than non-unionized direct care workers. Unionization was also associated with greater job satisfaction, and unionized workplaces reported better care, quality and safety for their workers.
These findings come from a pair of published papers, part of a series being released by the CAROW Initiative on Home Care Work, a partnership between the ILR School, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Cornell Tech that conducts research at the intersection of work, the home and long-term care workforce, health and health care delivery, and technology.
“More and more people want to age in place, and we need a sustainable workforce to be able to support them,” said Madeline Sterling, A&S ’08, MD, MPH, MS, associate professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and Director of the Initiative on Home Care Work. “Our team is looking at the factors that impact direct care workers and that will allow them to keep doing this work while being well compensated with a high degree of job satisfaction.
“Because our Initiative is comprised of scholars from all three campuses, we are able to bring together this focus on labor and health to ask questions about the workforce that haven’t been asked or answered in a rigorous way. And these two papers are setting the stage for us to do this on a bigger scale.”
In addition to Sterling, the research team that conducted these two studies consisted of Ariel Avgar, Ph.D. ’08, the David M. Cohen ’73 Professor of Labor Relations at ILR School, Russell Weaver, director of research at the Cornell ILR Buffalo Co-Lab, Daniel Spertus, assistant research coordinator at Weill Cornell Medicine, Joanna Bryan Ringel, data analyst at Weill Cornell Medicine, Heeeun Jang, post-doctoral associate at the ILR School, Andy Hickner, assistant librarian at Weill Cornell and ILR undergraduates Kiran Abraham-Aggarwal ’25 and Joseph Spak ’25.
“These two papers – the systematic literature review on the one hand, and then our analysis of Current Population Survey, a national dataset on the other – really give us a better, clearer sense of how unions impact working conditions and outcomes for workers in health care, and specifically low-wage direct care workers,” said Avgar, Director of CAROW and Senior Associate Dean for Outreach and Sponsored Research at ILR.
Read the full story on the ILR website.
Julie Greco is a senior communications specialist for the ILR School.
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