Home-care workers in Vermont have filed a union grievance with the state Agency of Human Services, claiming at least $1 million in retention bonuses that were owed to workers were not paid out.
Two rounds of bonuses have been paid out so far, with a third and final round scheduled to be added to paychecks in July.
George Millette, an organizer for the local chapter of the national American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents the home-care workers in the state, said the union analyzed pay data and found that more than 700 employees in each of the first two rounds did not receive their bonuses, which ranged between $1,000 and $2,500 each.
Home-care workers became eligible for the bonus after agreeing to continue to work for at least three months. Around 17% of roughly 4,300 eligible workers did not receive the promised payment in round one, and about 34% of the roughly 2,200 workers in the second round did not get their bonuses, either, Millette said. Many of the same people who did not receive what they were due in the first round also missed out the second, he said.
Workers were upset to learn that they didn’t get bonuses they were due, Millette said.
“Most of the people did not know they were even getting really ripped off like this,” he said.
The union met with the Agency of Human Services for the first time on Tuesday, and the two parties plan to meet again on Monday, said Tim Birch, the union’s field director for the New England area. Birch said he hopes the issue will get resolved then.
In response to questions and an interview request from VTDigger, Rachel Feldman, a spokesperson for the agency, said the agency was “committed to using the funding for the purpose for which it was intended.”
Beyond that, she said, “it is not our practice to comment on ongoing union matters.”
The union won retention bonuses in its 2022 contract with the state amid concerns about a statewide staffing shortage, said Heather Pfaff, a home health aide who helped bargain the contract.
“We have high turnover in this field,” she said. “We have such an aging population in Vermont. We have a large number of disabled people in Vermont, and we really needed to retain our home health care providers.”
Pfaff said many aides also struggled to work during the pandemic, when the risk of catching the virus made it a “particularly precarious time” for home-care providers to “go in and out of homes.”
The bonuses were largely funded by federal pandemic aid, Birch said.
The question of the letter
A letter may have been part of the problem.
The agency’s payroll company sent a letter to employees who were eligible for the retention bonus, asking them to attest that they planned to stay at their jobs for another three months, as contractually required to get the money, Millette said.
But the requirement to respond to a letter itself was not laid out in the union contract, and Millette said it may have proved to be a hurdle for workers who weren’t proficient in English or weren’t paying close attention to their mail. It is unclear whether the agency or the payroll company initiated the letter.
“It’d be unfair to assume malicious intent,” he said. “Whoever made the decision to do a letter, I’m sure they thought nothing of it. But it did have negative results.”
Birch pointed out that many people who did not respond to the letter ended up working those three months, yet never received the bonus.
He said it was particularly “outrageous” considering that the workers in question are “some of the lowest-paid people in the state.” Union members earn $13.44 an hour, going up to $14.05 an hour in July, according to the contract.
That’s an annual pay of about $28,000 to $29,000 a year for full-time employees, compared with the Vermont average of about $40,000 a year, according to U.S. Census data.
For Eric Haskins, a home health aide who did not receive one of the bonuses, it was “just one more thing that felt like the world’s screwing me over.”
The state pays Haskins to take care of his mother, who needs help with basic tasks. But the pay is so low that he still has to work other jobs to keep his family afloat.
Haskins dropped out of high school to care for his and his siblings with developmental disabilities. He said he’s had no training on how to take care of his mother besides a few lectures from the nurses overseeing her care.
His mother suffered complications from surgery that have made it impossible to do the things she used to do, like cook dinner, he said. Yet the family has received little assistance for things like mobility aids to help her go outside.
“None of this was her fault,” Haskins said. “And no one seems to want to help you except for the bare minimum. And then they just kind of let us exist the way we do and don’t seem to want to actually help make anything better.”
He also said he’s received little communication from the state or its payroll contractor.
“The people in charge of stuff always just seem to not really care,” he said.
Correction: This story has been updated to more accurately describe home-care workers.
