As baby boomers age, there is increasing demand for people to take care of them. In California, efforts to improve the working conditions for those caregivers led to a giant merger this summer of in-home caregivers and nursing home workers.
The resulting Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 2015 is the largest long-term care union in the country, representing 315,000 workers.
This comes as union membership is about half of what it was a few decades ago, dropping from more than 20 percent of the work force in the early 1980s to just over 11 percent last year.
Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd speaks with the woman at the helm of the new SEIU Local 2015, United Long Term Care Workers’ Union: Laphonza Butler.
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Guest
- Laphonza Butler, provisional president of SEIU Local 2015. She tweets @LaphonzaB.
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