By William J. Taylor/ Guest Columnist
Thursday, February 9, 2006

The shameful wages that human service organizations pay their direct care staff, those who care and support our family members and neighbors in group homes and day programs across the state, should be a cause for concern, disappointment, even anger, though ultimately it should inspire action on all our parts.

For the past quarter century I have been privileged to lead Advocates, a private non-profit human service organization based in Framingham. There is much about my organization that I am proud of, having watched it grow from eight staffsupporting 25 people with disabilities to one with 800 staffsupporting over 6,000 people today. Similarly there is much that the Commonwealth can take pride in, having devoted resources toward helping vulnerable citizens -- citizens once abandoned or cast out -- to now achieve meaningful roles in their communities in terms of participation, work, residence and relationships. These are, after all, our sons and daughters, our sisters and brothers, our mothers and fathers, our friends and neighbors.

However, I also live every day in shame. As the 54-year-old son of an 88-year-old member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103, I am in my bones deeply dedicated to management practices that would make my father proud. From the moment I assumed a management position I was committed to treating and paying workers in ways that my father would expect of his son.

Alas, I am thrice ashamed. First, I do not pay a just, or even a living wage to hundreds of my loyal and dedicated workers. Next, as staff numbers and their qualifications insidiously decline, so do I insidiously break my promise to those we serve. And, finally, for the past 19 years I, along with my fellow providers, have been utterly ineffective in convincing our government and you, the electorate, that these programs need annual rate adjustments, if we are to keep pace with inflationary pressures, and thereby continue to provide the same level of quality service from one year to the next.

Since 1987, the last time human service contracts received an across the board cost of living adjustment, inflation in the Northeast has climbed 82 percent. The combined total of all the occasional government appropriations for salary increases in the past 19 years amounts to only 8 percent of today’s "human services" budget.

During these years human service workers have seen their wages fall from 75 percent of the state’s average wage in 1987 to less than 45 percent of the state’s average wage in 2005. Group home clients have seen support staff ratio’s fall significantly. If you worked in a group home in the 1980’s you would have likely worked with 2-3 other staff each evening. Today you often work alone.

In these services where 70 percent of costs relate to staffing it was partly by reducing the number of staff in each home that human service organizations have been able to provide some wage increases, however inadequate, while also managing cost increases in health insurance, food, supplies, utilities, general insurance, transportation, rents, mortgages, repairs, and the unrelenting stream of unfunded regulatory mandates.

Businesses can raise prices, universities can raise tuitions, municipalities can raise taxes, but human service non-profits in Massachusetts cannot raise rates. Laws, regulations and even market forces, which are unnaturally distorted by monopsony (one buyer; many sellers), all conspire to prevent it. Even the powerful alignment of management with worker, so common in human service organizations in Massachusetts, is helpless without the Commonwealth’s real and formal commitment in written law to the values of justice, fairness, and adequacy.

My father, a World War II veteran, who also survived the Great Depression, and who is now enveloped by the deepening darkness of Alzheimer’s disease, asks me the same three questions every time I see him, and every five minutes that I am with him: How many staff do you have? What do you pay them? Do you provide them good benefits? Even as this tragic night steals him away, this survivor of America’s Greatest Generation remembers to ask the important questions about how those of us in positions of privilege and power treat those for whom we bear responsibility. We still have much to learn about core values from this generation now leaving us in such great numbers every day.

I apologize to my father; I apologize to my staff, and to those we support for my ineffective advocacy up till now. But the dollar inadequacies that cause my shame also threaten this Commonwealth’s ability to continue to feel proud of all it has worked to create.

This year’s state revenue projections are already $1 billion over budget. It would cost $85 million to provide for a 3.35 percent rate adjustment that would cover just this year’s inflation. Somehow, together, we’ve got to find the ways and the means to get sufficient dollars on the table to enact and maintain fair and adequate rates, so that providers can pay a fair and just wage; so that clients can get the support they need and deserve; and so that we all can continue to feel proud of the interdependent and welcoming communities we have built.