By Gao Mingde
August 7, 2013
In New York, one in five adults is involved in caring for the elderly or the disabled. The current problem is that doing home care work, compensation is often small, and people who employ home care workers complain about lack of quality and service. The problem is how to solve it?
In New York, there are more than one million people involved in home care , care for the elderly and the disabled. Today, the community organization The Alliance for a Greater New York published a report highlighting some of the problems they face. New York State Assemblyman Richard Gottfried: "The recommendations in here and the findings I think are very important.” The report shows that in the next decade, home care will become New York strongest industries, and is expected to provide 76,000 jobs. ALIGN senior analyst Maya Pinto: "Unfortunately, home care jobs are not good jobs. they don’t provide family-sustaining wages, and also a lot of seniors and families also struggle to find quality care.” ALIGN’s eight months of survey results show that home care staff and people who receive care agreed that improving home care workers' wages are the most important priority. 62% of home care practitioners had an income of less than $ 25,000, under the poverty line for a family of four. In the greater New York area, thousands of ethnic Chinese are engaged in home care and also in a similar situation. ALIGN senior analyst Maya Pinto: “There’s a large population of Chinese domestic workers and these workers receive very low wages and they’re subjected sometimes to very exploitative working conditions.” In this report, ALIGN announced their findings. They believe that we should be more concerned about home care staff and the care of people's needs, because the industry involves many families, and there are employment opportunities for so many. ALIGN Executive Director Matt Ryan: “Coming out of the Great Recession, I think care is going to be the core of what kind of economy we build.”
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