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By ELIZABETH DONALD
Illinois Correspondent
East Alton, IL – Each day, Terrie Powell visits the home of a senior citizen who needs help. She cooks and cleans, takes them to appointments, cares for them and even changes them as necessary.
Powel has been doing home care aid work for 14 years and joined a protest with her fellow SEIU Healthcare members May 21 calling on state leaders in Springfield to close tax loopholes for billionaires so that these workers can make $2 more per hour.
Their current salary is about $18.75 an hour, whereas cost-of-living indicates they should be at about $25 an hour, Powell said. These workers make far less than they would be paid at private nursing homes, she said, but the clients they care for are frequently lower income and don’t have family capable or available to take care of them.
‘YOU GET ATTACHED TO YOUR CLIENTS’
“You get attached to your clients… you’re part of the family,” Powell said. Equally as important: the clients are happier in their own homes, rather than being relegated to Medicare nursing homes.
It’s also a cost savings to the state, she said: a nursing home might cost $86,000 a year, but only $18,500 to keep them in their own homes with an aid worker, according to SEIU Healthcare. The program, titled Community Care Program, allows 120,000 Illinois seniors to live in their homes who would otherwise end up in a nursing home.
But there’s a major shortage in home care aid workers, estimated by SEIU Healthcare at more than 12 million unfulfilled work hours in FY 2024 alone.
“$20 an hour is not a lot to ask for when the cost of everything keeps going up,” Powell said.
‘A BROKEN SYSTEM FOR DECADES’
Powell and fellow home care worker Jenny Smith were two of the speakers at an SEIU rally in East Alton outside the Illinois Department of Human Services May 21. A similar rally took place in Peoria ahead of the May 31 state budget deadline, calling on Illinois lawmakers to invest in care workers by closing corporate tax loopholes and adding a digital ads tax on major technology companies.
“Illinois has had a broken tax system for decades. The working poor and middle class pay a much higher share of what we get paid in state income taxes than the ultra-wealthy do, and the social services that working families depend on suffer the consequences,” said Tonja Evans, a SEIU HCII member and Peoria home care worker of 46 years. “And while working people are being told there’s ‘not enough money’ for things like home care, food assistance, childcare, or affordable housing, billionaires and massive corporations are getting even bigger tax breaks.”
$4 BILLION A YEAR IN LOOPHOLES
SEIU estimates that Amazon, Google, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) and other large corporations have dodged $4 billion a year in Illinois taxes through tax code loopholes.
“Jeff Bezos became one of the richest men on Earth because workers kept his business running. And yet, instead of giving back and investing in the public good, corporations like Amazon continue to get tax breaks, loopholes, giveaways while everyday people are crushed under constantly rising costs,” Powell said.
“That is why our state legislators must act now. We need our legislators to pass a budget that raises revenue from the wealthiest corporations in order to fund the critical services that seniors, workers and our communities need.”
The rallies are part of a major statewide push by SEIU, including May Day marches and rallies and a pending lobby day in Springfield to draw legislators’ attention to the issue. In April, more than 600 care workers and seniors rallied in Springfield in support of the $2 raise for home care workers.
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