Posts tagged Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program
1199SEIU begins organizing after consumer directed home care overhaul
March 4, 2026 // This month, 1199SEIU sent letters about the effort to aides in the state’s Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, an $11 billion Medicaid program that allows disabled and elderly residents to hire and manage their own home care. The letter informs workers of a September agreement between 1199SEIU and the administrator, Georgia-based Public Partnerships, creating a process through which they can vote to join a union. The effort could add more than 250,000 members to the powerful union’s rolls, growing its already large base by as much as 55% and amplifying its influence in the city and state. The notice comes after Hochul’s controversial overhaul of the program, which centralized its administration and opened the door for organizing a new sector of labor.
Editorial: Hochul ‘anti-fraud’ scheme backfires into a taxpayer gift to a monster union
March 3, 2026 // After we and others flagged how loose eligibility rules and other issues had led to a 1,200% spike in CDPAP enrollment, soaring fraud and outlays of $11 billion, the gov used public outrage to pass a reform that she vowed would rein in the program. Yet her “solution” was simply to hire a single company, Public Partnerships, to centralize payments to these aides — which now lets them legally count as PPL employees, and so qualified to unionize.
Editorial: Hochul’s home-care ‘fix’ may not be corrupt — but it’s sure a disaster
December 18, 2025 // The smoking gun email — obtained via a FOIL request by Empire Center watchdogs — confirms that state officials were in contact with reps for Public Partnership LLC, or PPL, weeks before lawmakers even authorized bidding on managing the home-care program, and long before PPL won the five-year, $1 billion contract to oversee CDPAP... That’s because the revamp has opened to door for powerhouse SEIU 1199 to turn those 400,000 home-care aides into union members; in exchange for its massive windfall in dues, 1199 will surely immediately start pushing for pay hikes and other benefits for them.
NY patients come last as 1199 SEIU angles for $200M-a-year Medicaid payday
December 15, 2025 // Hochul’s law makes PPL a private “employer,” so unionizing its caregivers would mean 1199 could force every one of them to pay a 2% tribute — or get fired. At the current number of CDPAP caregivers, 1199 would snag another $200 million a year. PPL is likely cooperating because doing so is something akin to buying protection from mobsters. Everyone in Albany has seen the 1199-financed attack ads lobbed at governors and other state officials who question the size or efficacy of Medicaid. If this unionization scheme succeeds, such public lobbying would explode. The union won’t just have an incentive to keep the caregiver sign-up rules loose — it will have a fiduciary duty to keep wasting public money, and to pressure lawmakers for more.
New York’s Fastest-Growing Union Is Management’s Best Friend — and Some Workers Don’t Even Know They’re Members
December 20, 2024 // Though she last worked for Five Borough two months ago, she stopped receiving pay stubs long before that, she said — paperwork that would have had to show deductions, including for union dues. Supervisors ignored her repeated requests for pay records, she said. Through such voluntary recognition deals with management, less than a decade after its founding, HHWA has exploded in size. It currently claims some 43,000 members, up from 14,141 in 2018. An investigation into Home Healthcare Workers of America by THE CITY, based on interviews with past and current members, legal records and other public statements, reveals that this fast-growing union is a tool of company management in the form of a labor organization.
Op-Ed: Hochul needs to shut down this pricey home-health-care power grab
September 25, 2024 // And bidders are all too likely to fold: “The political world does not mess” with 1199 SEIU,” snarks Empire Center health-industry expert Bill Hammond. “Any bidder with the slightest understanding of what they were getting into when entering into this contract would know what that meant when [1199 SEIU] put that piece of paper in front of them.” Unionizing 200,000 caregivers would be a huge win for 1199, which already boasts 450,000 members. Yet it would defeat the purpose of the program — which, again, is to help family members, not unionized employees, to care for loved ones.