Southern Tier Independence Center calls on Governor Hochul to support the “Fair Pay for Home Care” bill (S5374/A6329), which would pay a living wage to home care workers and resolve the critical shortage of Home Care Aides and Personal Assistants in NY.

Are you going without home care services because the agency can’t meet your needs, or because you use CDPA and can’t hire enough staff? Your Legislators, New York’s Governor, and the Department of Health need to hear about it.

The Caring Majority created this website that is called “I Can’t Find Home Care Incident report. If you’re going without home care services, in a traditional home care agency or through CDPA, for some or all of your authorized hours, please submit an incident report at the link below.

https://www.nycaringmajority.org/incident-report

When you fill out this form:
1) It will automatically send an email with your name and story to your state legislators as well as New York’s Governor.
2) We will later share anonymous collated data with New York’s Governor, the New York State Department of Health, and the NY State Legislature to urge them to address this mounting crisis.

Your story will be used exclusively for advocacy purposes only, to support our work to include Fair Pay for Home Care in the NY State budget. We will not share your personal information with other organizations or entities without your consent.

New York has the dubious distinction of being the ‘worst in the nation’ in terms of unfilled home care jobs. Wages are at poverty-level, with upstate workers making only $12.50 an hour, which is lower than the mandated minimum wage of $15.00 per hour for fast food workers. With a rapidly aging population, these problems will only get worse, and the state will need to fill hundreds of thousands of job openings for home health and personal care aides in the coming years. If we don’t improve the quality of home care jobs and make meaningful investments in this sector, the workforce shortage will worsen, increasing the need for forced institutionalization, a clear violation of people’s civil rights. Right now, many New York State officials don’t believe there is a crisis, or that it is as bad as we report. That’s why the New York Caring Majority is gathering these incident reports from disabled New Yorkers and older adults who cannot get the services or workers they need.

You can make a difference!

If you don’t want to fill out an incident report, or you are not a service recipient but still support our issues, you can:

Call or email the Governor expressing support for the “Fair Pay for Home Care” bill (S5374/A6329).

Phone: 518-474-8390, press 3, then press 1 to leave a message or 2 to speak to a representative (NOTE: you may be on hold a long time if you select to speak with a representative!)

Email: Contact form link here