A tense wait for strike talks as group homes delay moving residents
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The vehicles are ready and destinations are set for residents of 200 group homes to move to safe locations ahead of a Friday morning strike of 2,100 workers. And all day Thursday, group home operators have changed plans on the fly, pushing back deadlines to relocate residents until the last possible minute.
By mid-day Thursday, Barry Simon, CEO of Oak Hill, which operates 70 of the affected homes, said he’d already twice pushed back plans to relocate 200 residents to nursing homes from 9 a.m. to noon and then until 3 p.m.
Oak Hill School in Hartford, the largest nonprofit agency serving the developmentally disabled.
Hundreds of developmentally disabled group home residents, trapped in a game of state budget brinkmanship, could be transferred into nursing homes next Thursday unless that battle is resolved soon.
At least two of the private, nonprofit agencies hired by the state to run group homes have begun plans to move clients into congregate care centers or to send them to live with their families if about 2,000 human service aides belonging to SEIU District 1199 New England go on strike next Friday.
Union members, who say they have faced years of low pay and poor benefits and then risked illness and death working during the first year of the coronavirus insist conditions must improve.
By Keith M. Phaneuf, CT Mirror
Connecticut’s largest health care workers’ union announced Friday that more than 2,000 group home staffers who serve the developmentally disabled and people suffering from mental illness or drug addiction plan to strike on May 21.
The announcement by SEIU District 1199 New England comes just seven days before 3,400 of its member nursing home workers are set to hit the picket lines a move that dramatically increases the pressure on state officials to increase public support for health care services.
Union officials say negotiations are continuing and also that a formal strike warning does not commit the bargaining unit to a work stoppage on the notice date.