Shift to Contract Work Hits State Workers

In 22 years working at the home, Glenn Fiedler has emptied bedpans, helped bathe patients and charted their diets. He regularly buys treats and selects special outfits for their birthdays, and he once served as an interpreter for a veteran who had suffered a stroke and began punctuating every gesture with the same profanity.

“A lot of them looked at me as being their lost son,” said Mr. Fiedler, 52, who earns $20.34 an hour. He said he could not cover his expenses on $10 an hour.

And like many of his state colleagues, he also worries that lower-paid contract workers will provide inferior care to the veterans. “You get what you pay for,” he said.

The lawsuit, filed by Anthony Spallone, a resident, says that fill-in contract workers have, among other things, repeatedly dropped residents and left them in urine-soaked beds, and once fed a resident solid food despite specific instructions not to.

Tim Frain, the chief executive of J2S, declined to comment.

Mr. Spallone, a 64-year-old Vietnam veteran who said he had served “12 months, eight days, four hours and 22 minutes” as an Army engineer, described the state’s caregivers as “like family.” He suggested the government “drop one less bomb overseas and pay these guys’ salaries.”

Some residents say the contract workers are vilified unfairly. “Care is predicated on compassion and empathy,” said Harold Sundberg, a World War II Navy veteran, not “a union label.”

Under the new contract, nursing assistants must have at least 12 months of experience, said Sara Dunne, acting administrator of the Grand Rapids home. She said current state workers could apply for the lower-paying slots.

Union leaders denounce the efforts to roll back years of negotiated wages and benefits. The public sector gave “people a chance to buy a home and send their kids to college,” said Eileen Kirlin, executive vice president of the public services division of the Services Employees International Union. When contractors take over and pay lower wages, “we’re just driving everybody down.”

Leonard Gilroy, director of government reform at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian research organization, said that outsourcing companies simply paid “the market rate,” which “may or may not correspond with whatever the government pay scale might be currently.”

Economists and other academics who study outsourcing are divided about whether it usually saves a government money. Recent data from Arizona shows that privately operated prisons often cost more to operate than state-run facilities. A study by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit Washington group, found that in 33 of 35 occupations, using contractors cost the federal government billions of dollars more than using government employees.

And some municipalities have brought outsourced services back into the public fold after determining they could perform the work as cost-effectively as private companies.

In June, one of the state workers at the Grand Rapids home, Emilie Perttu, 24, reluctantly left her job and took a nurse’s aide position at a hospital for a quarter less than she was making. Ms. Perttu, a single mother of two, started at the veterans’ home as a contract worker for J2S before becoming a state worker last year. She said that after Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, cited the outsourcing plans in his budget for 2012 and 2013, she feared losing her job or having her wages sharply reduced.

The lower wage, she says, has left her strained to cover $675 a month in rent, along with basics like food and child care. So Ms. Perttu collects $400 monthly in food stamps and child care assistance, programs administered by the state but largely financed by the federal government. She has not been able to buy winter coats for her children, she said, and often avoids calls from credit card bill collectors.

At the veteran’s home, “one check was enough to pay all the bills,” she said. Drawing on public assistance, she added, “is not helping our economy.”