The ILR School and Weill Cornell Medicine have received a $300,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to administer a worker-focused survey of home health aides across the North and the South of the United States. It will allow for a comparison of home care work in different institutional contexts, including the prevalence of labor unions in the North and limited collective representation in the South.
The principal investigators will include Senior Associate Dean for Outreach and Sponsored Research Ariel Avgar, Ph.D. '08, ILR's David M. Cohen '73 Professor of Labor Relations, Dr. Madeline Sterling, A&S '08, MD, MPH, MS, associate professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and director of ILR's Initiative on Home Care Work, and Zoë West, senior researcher for worker rights and equity at ILR's Worker Institute.
"I'm extremely grateful to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for their support of this really important work around the working conditions and the contributions that home health care workers make to patient care," Avgar said. "Working with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is unique because it's a partnership focused on the end goal, which is advancing health for everyone, and making sure that the workers delivering health care have what they need to thrive.
"This specific study will allow us not only to understand how home care workers contribute to patient care, but we'll be able to look at some variation across northern states and southern states and get a better sense of what levers of power they can use in advancing their own needs and the needs of their patients," said Avgar, director for the Center for Applied Research on Work (CAROW).
Through the survey, the research team will collect, document and compare critical dimensions of home care workers' roles, working conditions and sources, or lack of occupational power and voice.
