What's a job worth?

Most prognosticators seem to agree that in the new year, the rich will get richer and the rest of us. . . won't.

Ex-CEO Bob Nardelli will be given $262 million to walk quietly out the door of Home Depot in one day. Meanwhile, most of us will earn the same amount we earned last year, more or less, even when the people we work for are delighted with our performance.

Flat wages and increasing costs of living are especially a problem for direct caregivers.

In Wisconsin, the average wage for nursing assistants, home health aides, and personal care aides is $10.37 an hour (National Clearinghouse on the Direct Care Workforce. That's $5.35 an hour less than the "self-sufficiency" hourly rate for a full-time worker with one child in Milwaukee County (The Self-Sufficiency Guide for Wisconsin).

Why does a home health aide make $9.68 an hour while a copy-machine repair technician makes $17 an hour as a trainee, $22 in the field afterward? Aren't our parents and our children as valuable as our office machines?

Of course they are. But we don't need copy machine technicians 24/7, and the ratio of technician to machine is much higher than the ratio of caregiver-to-care-needer.

Then there's the elephant in the room: caregiving is still largely a woman's job, whereas copy machine repair is. . . not. At least not traditionally. And in Wisconsin, even for the same job, women make 71 cents for a man's dollar.

I think every job should afford a person who works it full-time and does a good job the income to be self-sufficient--have enough food to eat, a roof over his or her head, health care. . .

But how do we accomplish that? Even non-profit organizations need to have enough money (margin) to do their job well. As the head of a Catholic hospital I once knew always said, "No margin, no mission."

It would be hard to dispute that reimbursement isn't high enough and costs keep rising. Institutions face problems with money-in versus money-out, too, but on a larger scale.

And it would be easy to get discouraged and overlook the accomplishments of so many astonishing people who dedicate their lives to this work. Then we remember programs like Wisconsin's admirable pilot Family Care to improve choice, access, quality, and cost-effectiveness in long-term care.

Disclaimer time: please remember that these are my personal ruminations, and while this blog is for issues near the heart of The Milwaukee Aging Consortium, they aren't the Consortium's notions. Our members are both caregivers and organizations that hire them. Everyone is committed to making the lives of older people better, but there will always be differences among us about how to do that. Let's talk about it here, in the interest of better understanding--and finding win-win-win solutions!

One thing that might help: taking some of the burden of health insurance off the employer's back. Governor Doyle wants to expand Badger Care to cover all children in the state. That's a noble goal, but what about covering all people in the state? I'm buying the evidence that a statewide plan for everyone could be much less expensive for both the employer and the employee.

What's your take on this? How can we help employers, employees, and the people we serve to thrive, not just survive?