{"id":806,"date":"2005-04-11T17:29:29","date_gmt":"2005-04-11T17:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=806"},"modified":"2005-04-11T17:29:29","modified_gmt":"2005-04-11T17:29:29","slug":"fair_pay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=806","title":{"rendered":"Fair Pay"},"content":{"rendered":"

NPR did a story this morning on personal care attendants in Maryland<\/a>, where the state pays them only five dollars an hour. That’s even less than the federal minimum wage of $5.15\/hour. You can make more flipping burgers at McDonald’s than you can caring for a person with disabilities. In most states, PCAs are low-wage workers. In Minnesota, I think the average wage is $8-$10 per hour with few benefits and no chance in hell for a raise. Accordingly, the people who are attracted to PCA work tend to be the same people attracted to other low-wage jobs: college kids, newly-arrived immigrants, and people who simply don’t need\/care to make much money. PCAs aren’t treated as professionals and their pay reflects that. This is an ongoing problem for both people with disabilities and their PCAs. Many PCAs provide extraordinary quality of care, but our society seems to regard this work with some degree of disdain.
\nIf I had my way, PCAs would be trained and licensed professionals. A lot of people with disabilities disagree with me on the licensure thing, but I don’t see it as an onerous requirement. If we require hairdressers and truck drivers to be licensed, I don’t see why our standards should be lower for people providing personal care in someone’s home. The training wouldn’t have to be anything super intensive. But it should be enough to instill a sense a professionalism that is accompanied by a commensurate level of pay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NPR did a story this morning on personal care attendants in Maryland, where the state pays them only five dollars an hour. That’s even less than the federal minimum wage of $5.15\/hour. You can make more flipping burgers at McDonald’s than you can caring for a person with disabilities. In most states, PCAs are low-wage […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s9Iwau-fair_pay","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}