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Once a month, the workers at Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) review the company’s financial statement. They examine income and expenses, then decide where the balance should go. “The majority rules here. If the workers don’t like something, it doesn’t happen,” says Lillian Torres, who has been there for five years.
Like most workers here, Torres is also an owner of the company. Since City Limits first wrote about CHCA in 1995, the South Bronx company has grown from a $5.6 million to a $13 million-a-year enterprise. The staff has more than doubled, to 630 African-American and Latino women. More than two-thirds were on welfare before they came here; Torres, for one, had been on public assistance for 10 years.
Eighty percent of employees at CHCA are worker-owners and share in annual dividends, which have ranged from $100 to $800. With a down payment of $50, an employee can buy a share in the company, worth $1,000, paid in weekly installments of $3.65. Workers tend to stick around: The company has a 24 percent turnover rate, compared with the industry norm of 60 percent. Recently, CHCA celebrated the careers of 14 worker-owners who have been at the company since it began in 1985.
Worker-owners make an average of $8 an hour–a dollar higher than the industry average, but still a far cry from a living wage. The women at CHCA often think about giving themselves substantial raises, but have repeatedly opted instead for a comprehensive benefits package and small wage hikes. The co-op is dependent on public funding from Medicare and Medicaid and money for a raise just isn’t there.
Because it contracts with private agencies–80 percent of its contracts come from the Visiting Nurse Service of New York–CHCA has to sit on the sidelines of the union-run living wage campaign seeking $10 an hour, plus benefits, for home care workers under city contracts. Instead, its aides are doing their own advocacy. In May, 20 of them lobbied in Albany for higher Medicaid reimbursements and for a way to ensure that higher wages will follow. The group is also working to spread some of CHCA’s practices–including training that emphasizes empowerment, critical thinking, problem solving and team building–to the rest of the industry.
Yet CHCA is still one of a kind, and job applicants crowd the reception area. When they arrive, they see a sign: “We believe that when people have interesting jobs, a real voice in how their company operates, and are fairly paid, they will give their very best.”
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