in Pennsylvania, health care practitioners and technical workers earn an average salary of $77,730, while those in support occupations earn just $29,760.
There are steep class divisions within the health care workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 3,253,000 home health aides and personal care aides working in the U.S. in 2018. And the field was expected to grow at a much faster rate than the average industry workforce, with as many as 1.2 million new jobs by 2028. But home care workers are poorly paid, with an average salary of just $24,000 a year, or $11.57 an hour, according to the Bureau. Home care workers are organized under a group called United Homecare Workers of Pennsylvania managed by SEIU Healthcare PA and AFSCME, but state law prevents them from bargaining collectively. In Pennsylvania, health care practitioners and technical occupations earn an average salary of $77,730, while those in support occupations earn an average of $29,760 a year, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
But there is potential for health care workers to create common cause with each other and with workers in other service sectors, says Gabriel Winant, a labor historian at the University of Chicago. The coronavirus pandemic may be accelerating a process of “class formation” within and between those workforces, Winant says. And if people who work for the health care system can identify more common interests with each other and with larger populations that rely on the health care system, “it’s difficult to see how that doesn’t take on some degree of oppositional consciousness.” That could take any number of forms, including the relatively easy act of voting, Winant says. Perhaps especially in a swing state like Pennsylvania.
“Health care and social assistance as a share of the workforce is very clearly largest in deindustrialized places,” Winant says. “So to the extent that this workforce is politically significant, it also maps onto Rust Belt geography.”
During the Democratic presidential primary, some health care unions like National Nurses United came out strong for Bernie Sanders and Medicare for All. In Pennsylvania, the nurses in PASNAP have voted to support Medicare for All as well. And the union still supports that policy with Joe Biden as the presumptive nominee, says Maureen May, PASNAP’s president and a full-time registered nurse. Despite the association of Medicare for All with the progressive left, May says it’s an uncontroversial position within her union, even among politically conservative members in rural areas.