Wal-Mart workers in the Chattanooga area got a raise this week. The average full-time hourly worker now makes $13.38 an hour, and the average part-time wage is $10.58 an hour, according to news reports.
But not so for the some 20,000 front-line workers in Tennessee who help care for our residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities in facilities like Chattanooga’s Orange Grove. These key caregivers help the state’s most vulnerable citizens and their families, yet many of them haven’t had a raise in years because 90 percent of funding for operations like Orange Grove comes from state and federal sources, like TennCare.
Across the state, more than 8,000 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities rely on this network of about 20,000 workers. The state has another 6,000 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities on a waiting list for care. Yet the typical direct service worker pay rate in this field is $8.61 an hour. That makes it easy to see why the turnover rate in this very critical safety net is higher than 45 percent.
Orange Grove Executive Director Kyle Hauth and officials of similar nonprofit organizations are talking to state lawmakers this month in hopes of getting an additional $20 million commitment from the state’s new budget to provide a $1 an hour rate increase for these workers.
Hauth said the state’s budget does give state workers a 4 percent raise, but includes no increases for the workers at partner groups like Orange Grove that provide the bulk of state disabilities care. In fact, over the past decade state raises for direct service providers increased only 1.9 percent, compared to 16 percent for state employees.