Home-Care Aides at Poverty\u2019s Edge Are Hottest U.S. Jobs<\/a>.\u201d The article profiles a woman who works as a Personal Care Aide, or PCA.\u00a0 Her hours are erratic, and the pay equally so, as she\u2019s paid partially by self-paying clients, who don\u2019t consistently have the money to pay her, partially directly by Medicaid, and partially via Medicaid but contingent on the client getting their paperwork completed in time.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, she continues to put in her usual shifts at her clients even when she knows she won\u2019t paid, out of a feeling of obligation and an awareness that her services are needed whether the paycheck comes or not.<\/p>\nShe doesn\u2019t provide healthcare, just more ordinary personal care (washing her client\u2019s hair, for instance), light housekeeping (cooking, cleaning), and companionship.<\/p>\n
Her pay? \u00a0$9.78\/hour.\u00a0 (That\u2019s the Medicaid rate.\u00a0 Do her non-Medicaid clients pay more, or less, or the same?\u00a0 The article doesn\u2019t say.)<\/p>\n
Is this fair?<\/p>\n
On the one hand, the actual concrete skills required are fairly minimal.\u00a0 Cooking and cleaning are rather basic skills.\u00a0 For pete\u2019s sake, she\u2019s not changing adult diapers, or dressing wounds, or the like.\u00a0 And the work is, by and large, less strenuous than an always-on-the-go job at McDonalds.\u00a0 The article says, of the profiled woman, that she brings her 4-month-old baby along with her, since she can\u2019t afford daycare, and one imagines that this is a win-win to the extent that her elderly clients are probably rather happy to have a baby in the house.\u00a0 But that\u2019s still an indicator of the nature of the job warranting its low pay.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, the article has a handy graphic that tells us that Personal Care Aide and Home Health Aide jobs\u00a0are both forecast to increase by 70% over the decade from 2010 \u2013 2020.\u00a0 The median wage for the former:\u00a0 $19,640; for the latter, $20,560, so not much more.\u00a0 And in both cases, the wages are basically fixed by the government.\u00a0 And there\u2019s something unsettling about a job that will be increasingly important, as the Baby Boom generation ages and their children are less able to care for them than in the past (due to fewer stay-at-home adults and more geographical dispersion), being paid so little \u2014 and the argument that \u201cthese people should just get more education in order to get better-paid jobs\u201d doesn\u2019t work as well when it\u2019s these lower-paid jobs that are growing \u2014 and when, after all, much more so than a fast-food worker, we need these workers and can\u2019t just shrug it off as, \u201cwell, the jobs will be automated soon enough anyway.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Tribune featured a story they picked off Bloomberg today, though apparently the article itself is not new: \u201cHome-Care Aides at Poverty\u2019s Edge Are Hottest U.S. Jobs.\u201d The article profiles a woman who works as a Personal Care Aide, or PCA.\u00a0 Her hours are erratic, and the pay equally so, as she\u2019s paid partially by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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