The stated purpose of Initiative 1029 – stiffening training requirements for home-care workers – is hard to quarrel with.
It would require, with some exceptions, those workers to be certified with 75 hours of training, more than double the current requirement of 34 hours. They would have to get federal background checks, despite the fact that they are already being screened by the Washington State Patrol.
A big concern here is cost vs. benefit. With a yawning state deficit, lawmakers would have to scare up $30 million in the next biennium to pay for the measure.
Closer to home, I-1029 is likely to drive up the cost of employing home care workers. It’s also likely to create a needless obstacle for would-be workers who won’t need that much training – or will need some other kind of training more suited to the circumstances of the people they’ll be caring for.
Passage of this initiative would hardly be the end of the world. But there’s another problem: It would reward a union’s end run around a responsible effort in the Legislature to achieve the same ends.
Lawmakers – including Democratic Rep. Dawn Morrell of Puyallup – were close to a compromise measure aimed at stepping up training in a more careful and targeted way. According to Morrell, the Service Employees International Union didn’t want to compromise, so it helped scuttle the deal, then bankrolled the initiative.
We think the Legislature is the place to address an issue like this, especially when lawmakers are already showing every inclination to do so.
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