Union Leader Navigates The Growing Industry Of Elder Care

NPR

Published September 7, 2015 at 12:33 PM EDT

Laphonza Butler is head of the SEIU Local 2015, the United Long Term Care Workers' Union. (Twitter)

As baby boomers age, there is increasing demand for people to take care of them. In California, efforts to improve the working conditions for those caregivers led to a giant merger this summer of in-home caregivers and nursing home workers.

The resulting Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 2015 is the largest long-term care union in the country, representing 315,000 workers.

This comes as union membership is about half of what it was a few decades ago, dropping from more than 20 percent of the work force in the early 1980s to just over 11 percent last year.

Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd speaks with the woman at the helm of the new SEIU Local 2015, United Long Term Care Workers’ Union: Laphonza Butler.

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Guest

Laphonza Butler, provisional president of SEIU Local 2015. She tweets @LaphonzaB.