Amy Firlotte, Danielle Turpin and Deise Armstrong, the co-founders of Home Care Workers' Co-operative

ABANDONING OLD PEOPLE to their fate wasn’t an option for Danielle Turpin. So, she quit her job in a Peterborough, Ontario long-term-care facility in 2019 and started a workers’ co-op.

It was the best way to improve care for seniors and for workers, like her, who provide that care.

Bad for seniors and workers

Turpin says chronic under-staffing in LTC led to unsafe work practices where she worked and to a steep reduction in the level of care she and her co-workers were able to give. She says she complained repeatedly, but “nothing really helped.”

Her solution was to leave long-term-care completely and move into home-care, as a way to deliver the high level of personal care she wanted to provide, to seniors in their own homes. Two of her fellow personal-care-workers decided to join her. But, the business the three women set up was something different. It was a non-profit workers’ co-op.

A co-op gives workers their own personal stake in a business and direct input into setting objectives and the methods used to get there. “I’m kind of a low-key labour activist in a way,” says Turpin, “and it’s very important to me: labour rights and workers’ rights,” she says.

Turpin hopes her workers’ co-op can show a way to slow or stop the exodus of PSWs and nurses from home-care by empowering those on the front lines. “I’m trying to draw good PSWs to home-care,” she says.

Worker control

The worker co-op model is “basically an employee-owned enterprise, which operates on the co-operative principles,” explains Hazel Corcoran, executive director of the Canadian Worker Co-op Federation.

She says “one member, one vote” is a “fundamental” tenet: “It’s not one share, one vote; it’s not the capital that’s controlling the enterprise. It’s the labour, the people that work in it that control the enterprise.”

Both for-profits and non-profits can be structured as co-ops. But in either case, co-ops focus less on the bottom line: “Certainly profit is not the end in any co-operative; it’s the means to an end, and in the case of a worker co-op, the end is basically decent employment for people at which they have a voice,” says Corcoran.

And because the PSWs in the Home Care Workers Co-operative Inc set their own workloads, Turpin notes, they’re able to spend more time with clients, who have “more control over their own care and how that works.”

Anyone working for the Home Care Workers Co-operative can apply to become a member after six months to a year of employment, depending on hours logged.

“Once they apply for membership, they’re actually applying to be a co-owner,” explains Turpin, who notes existing members vote on applications.

Higher wages

Ownership is proportional to the number of service hours members contribute to the co-op’s operations, and members vote on a variety of items, such as what to do with surplus funds, which are always invested back into the organization.

“One of the major things that we would vote on would be our wages or how we go about supplementing travel costs or things like that,” says Turpin.

“We could give bonuses. We could decide to put money into our education fund, because we want to offer more skills to our PSWs.”

Including the three co-founders, there are currently 12 employees, who provide more than 250 service hours a week to roughly 20 clients.

PSWs in home and community care in Ontario earn an average of $17.30 an hour.

At the co-op, base pay is $22 per hour for members and $20.25 for non-members—along with seven paid sick days and compensation for travel

Not a final solution

Turpin admits that a private business model—even a co-op—offers no final solution and is at odds with having a fully-funded public health-care system. She agrees that the real solution for Ontario’s home-care crisis is a publicly administered non-profit system with public-sector health-care staff.

However, within the current structure, she can’t see a better alternative: “We’re just trying to fix the problem that exists right now within our means, really. The more of these co-ops emerge, the more that puts pressure on the government to maybe create a better publicly- funded system in the first place, and that would be my goal."

- 30 -