From the Fight for $15 to major victories in IHSS and nursing homes, SEIU 2015 has led the charge for higher wages. Hear from union leaders on how these wins were achieved and how caregivers can keep pushing for more. Today’s guests are SEIU 2015 Executive VP Kim Evon, who discusses how the union was victorious in pursuing these wage gains, and Region 5 Executive Board member Claudia Arevalo, who shared how recent wage increases have inspired caregivers in San Francisco County.
TRANSCRIPT
Arnulfo De La Cruz: Welcome to Who Cares!, a podcast by SEIU 2015.
I’m Arnulfo de la Cruz, the President of SEIU 2015 and now the host of Who Cares. We are the largest union of long term care workers across the country. We are committed to the important issues related to long term care workers and care recipients, and so happy that you could join us today.
At the end of last year, I shared with you the exciting news that, due to your hard work and our Union’s hard work, we’re receiving well deserved raises this year. Every IHSS worker across the state of California is receiving a 50-cent-an-hour raise, and many of you have already seen that raise reflected in your paycheck. This 50-cent raise is because the California minimum wage went up, and we want to make sure that union members understand that’s because of your Union’s Fight For $15. It was a campaign that was launched more than a decade ago that many of your sisters and brothers and siblings in the Union played a really big role in winning.
To explain more, today I’m joined by two of my very good friends, SEIU 2015 Executive Vice President Kim Evon and Claudia Arevalo, an SEIU 2015 board member and member of our San Francisco IHSS county bargaining team. We’re excited to discuss how we got here and also what’s next as we continue to fight for fair pay across the state for caregivers. Kim Claudia, thank you for joining Who Cares.
Kim, let’s start with you, let me ask you the first question. Can you recap for our listeners the work our union has done over the last several years to raise wages for workers across California, and why this is so important?
Kim Evon: Yeah, thanks, and thanks for letting me be part of this podcast, I’m super excited.
So SEIU has been at the forefront of this effort to raise wages, not just for care workers, but for all workers, and not just across California, but across the United States. So for 15 years, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour. It’s not indexed to inflation, so as prices go up, our paychecks provide less and less. And I don’t know today if you know, an hour’s worth of pay gets you a cup of coffee or even a dozen eggs. So it’s an issue that is long overdue to be dealt with, but we started to deal with this issue in 2012.
SEIU began a campaign to raise the minimum wage, and we called it the Fight For $15, and we really worked to build a movement in our communities to increase the minimum wage, not just at the federal level, but across our states. We knew that raising the minimum wage was, and still is, a key part of eliminating poverty wage work and being able to lift millions of working people up at the same time. So just think about what it would mean to be able to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than doubling the current minimum wage.
And our SEIU 2015 members were on the front lines of this fight since 2012–leaders like Carmen Roberts, Wendy Whitaker, Janice McDermott and countless others were part of this effort, and we passed our $15 minimum wage here In California in 2016, which fundamentally improved the lives of over 6 million California workers and their families.
And our success in doing so, along with our siblings from New York, who, within a 24 hour period, passed a similar $15 minimum wage that set a fire across this country and encouraged workers in communities in many states to follow in Arizona, in Colorado, in Maine, in Minnesota, in Montana, Ohio, South Dakota and Washington. Those communities also said we need to lift up the minimum wage, and unlike at the federal level, our minimum wage does keep up with inflation.
Here in California, this raise that went into effect in January is not a handout. It is a victory that you and countless others fought for, and you won together with your union.
De La Cruz: Wow. Thanks, Kim. Six million Californians were impacted. And I know so many of you listening, hearing Kim talk about that incredible history and that achievement, so many of you were a part of that. As Kim mentioned, you remember the slogan, Fight for $15, the marches, the meetings at the capitol in our local municipalities, you all played such a big role in that incredible victory, and it means so much for so many workers across the state.
Again, six million. It’s the most significant wage increase that we saw for that many people in so long across our state’s history. And Kim, I know that you’ve been on the front lines of this fight for so many years, every step of the way with our members.
You know, one of the arguments that we often hear against minimum wage increase is that I might be making $2 an hour more than minimum wage, let’s say at $17 an hour, but if we raise the minimum wage to $17, then I’m only making minimum wage, and people feel like they end up falling behind instead of having a rising tides lift all boats mentality. But for IHSS workers, that’s not the case, is it?
Evon: No. In fact, I would say in general, it’s like when you lift the floor, you create the pathway to lift the ceiling. And I would say our union got busy being very innovative and ensuring that when we’re lifting that floor, we’re giving rise to the ceiling in terms of wages.
So we, in our union contracts with counties up and down California, we made sure that any increase we win at the bargaining table is added on top of whatever the minimum wage is. So if you made $1.50 above the minimum wage last year, and then the state’s minimum wage went up. That means you’re currently earning 50 cents more per hour, whether you’ve got a raise in your contract or not, and when you go back to negotiate your next IHSS contract, you’re going to seek to increase it even more. It’s a huge economic impact for our members. And again, it’s about taking that floor and making sure that we use it to create a new ceiling.
De La Cruz: Thank you so much, Kim. And again, what an incredible victory, and so appreciative, Kim, as always, sister of your leadership and the passion that you have in fighting with our members side by side on this issue of economic justice and wages. And I know Kim that we talk about this a lot, but when we talk about siblings, the crisis of care that the need for caregivers over the next two decades in California is expected to more than double because of our aging population, but the number of caregivers available to provide for those consumers. There’s not enough, right? So we know, as 2015, that one of the most impactful ways to attract caregivers of the future has to be to raise wages, right? Both through our minimum wage work and also through our living wage work. So again, Kim, I just really appreciate you for joining.
I also want to bring in our union sister Claudia here to talk about the recent victory to keep our victories going in San Francisco. As you all know, San Francisco, for a long time, has played a really important role, I think, not just across the state of California, but across the country and setting real standards for home care workers in particular, and also nursing home workers. And Claudia has been a caregiver and on the front lines and so many of these fights for over 32 years, and has fought tirelessly for caregivers, our union rights and also immigration rights. I have seen Claudia many times in the streets of San Francisco and across California, in Washington, DC, being an incredible advocate for caregivers, and is such a force. So happy to have her joining. She is a member of our bargaining team also in San Francisco, and has actually worked very closely with Kim as our executive vice president, so many other leaders across the Bay Area and in San Francisco, Claudia tell us about the new union contract in San Francisco, because workers, they’re going to receive another raise in July, if I understand that correctly.
Claudia Arevalo: Good afternoon everyone. My name is Claudia Arevalo, and I have been a home care worker for 30 years, and I’ve been working in this effort in San Francisco. And we are very excited because we just won a wage increase, and now we are making $22 an hour. And it’s very exciting because this just started on January 1. And then also I am excited, because in July, we are going to be making $22.50. And this is thanks to all the efforts from the union and all the workers that are always fighting to continue raising those wages.
De La Cruz: Si, thank you, Claudia, and again, really appreciate your leadership and all the leadership that you provided as being part of this bargaining team, which is a really an incredible representative group of San Francisco home care providers who actually sit and bargain with the county.
I was hoping that you could also share some of the stories that you’ve heard from our siblings in San Francisco on what these raises mean for them, for them as providers of care for their families, what have you been hearing in terms of what is the real economic impact for our members in San Francisco?
Arevalo: Yes, we are very excited, and our brothers and sisters are very happy, because we can see that they have the joy now to just join the efforts and to have the membership signup, because we are seeing the growth. And we know that we want more, and now they’re very excited because they saw that we want $22. Like five people called me yesterday, very exciting. Excited telling me, oh, thank you. We already received the $22 and they saw that in their new checks. And they’re getting even more excited because they’re going to be receiving $22.50 in July. So this is a very important for us to continue growing and for also just getting that excitement to participate in the fight and all the things that we can do together
De La Cruz: That’s wonderful. Claudia, you’ve been part of so many of these struggles and fights on behalf of caregivers. Congratulations. We appreciate your dedication, your passion, all of your time and energy, and what you’ve given not just for home care providers across California, but again, across the country. Congratulations, Claudia, so happy you were able to join and it’s great to hear your voice.
Kim, just taking a second to turn back to you. You know, we’ve talked a lot about IHSS right home care, but we’ve also had some pretty incredible wins with our nursing homes. Would you be able to give an update to our listeners as it relates to our nursing home workers?
Evon: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to also say, like, the victories around you know, our contracts and IHSS and our contracts and improvements in the wages, hours and working conditions for nursing homes, we’ve done that together. Our members across these sectors show up in solidarity with each other and for each other, and they know that when their sister or brother or sibling wins, that gives them the opportunity to also win.
And so I just want to lift up that this isn’t done in a silo. It’s done as a collective union family and so for nursing home members, they have really, really stood united around the dignity of their work, improvement in wages and benefits, but also safe staffing. They’ve won improvements in wages and benefits for close to 1000 workers in over 100 facilities so far, and we are not done. Our job is not done.
We are focused on improving quality in these facilities, and that means good union jobs, and the current program that we advocated for and one as a way to begin and advocating for the improvement of quality and tying that to good unions jobs is called the Workforce Quality and Incentive Program, often referred to as WQIP, for shorthand.
This program brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to California nursing homes, but I want to be clear that money was tied to those homes and those operators that were meeting staffing and worker standards more than three times as much as the previous Quality Incentive Program, and it was a real shift tying money to these nursing homes directly to the quality of work and benefits and wages and staffing. And we pushed more than 110 facilities up and down the state to ensure that between 10% and 20% of that money was used to compensate workers in 2025.
De La Cruz: That’s incredible. Kim, so exciting. Wow. You know, it’s been a heavy couple of weeks here with the incoming administration, everything that we’ve heard that they’re planning, and the attacks against our communities, our members and their families, caregivers, in general, but that’s a really great way to start off 2025 so congratulations to you, to Claudia. We really appreciate you all being able to join and really give us inspiration and hope that we can continue to win, even in a challenging environment. And you all really have put some steps in order to do that. It has allowed San Francisco members to continue to win in really, really big ways. We know that there’s a lot more work to do.
And also, as I just mentioned, there has been a big shift in the landscape, right? You all, we know what happened with the presidential election. We know the attacks right now happening in our immigrant communities, the attacks against diversity at the corporate level, you name it, potential attacks against Medicaid. This is an incredibly important moment for us to continue to stick together in unity and lift up our voices. I’m excited to share these updates with you, because these are your victories. These are victories that were based on the work that you have done for so many years, these are the seeds sprouting and the work that you’ve done in the battles that you’ve taken on. You fought them, you earned them, and I know how much of an impact they will make in your day to day life.
We need to continue to push for a higher federal minimum wage. We need to continue to push for better working conditions, fair pay and the respect our care industry deserves. We talked a lot about, specifically wages. We did touch around standards that Kim talked about in our nursing homes, but attracting the care workforce of the future, making sure that our members, who are working every single day, are able to do so with respect and dignity. We understand, if our members can do that has a direct relationship to the quality of care that hundreds of thousands of Californians receive every single day. Right? So bargaining to raise standards for IHSS providers and our big master contract will be working on this year as part of one fight, one statewide bargaining table, and also our labor management committee with the largest nursing home employers across the state, we have set up some really important foundational work.
We’re going to continue to engage around these issues. You all as part of our Who Cares! Podcast. I’m glad today we took the time to reflect on our wins, and I’m also really looking forward to joining you as we move forward in the next fights to get fair contracts and respect for our work. Thank you for joining for another episode of Who Cares! I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Take good care.