When you listen to Rick Surpin talk about what led him to create Cooperative Home Care Associates, you’ll be moved both by his passion for well-paid, stable jobs for home care workers, as well as his commitment to the delivery of high quality, person-centered care for those in need.

Rick founded the agency 25 years ago as a worker-owned home care agency in the South Bronx. Over the years, it has spread to other NYC boroughs, and has grown to become the largest worker cooperative in the U.S.! As a worker-owned organization, each employee is invited to purchase $1,000 ownership stake in the company. This is done through small weekly payroll deductions of just over $3 for a five-year period, so workers can afford to become owners. The organization is run by a Board of Directors and a worker assembly. By purchasing a share in the company, workers have the right to vote. They also have the right to be on the company’s Board of Directors.

Rick says there’s one other home care company in the U.S. that’s worker-owned in Philadelphia, and it was developed through a sister agency of Cooperative Home Care. There are other small cooperatives providing in-home care in Wisconsin, but Rick says it’s not a prevalent model. I asked him why. He told me:

Well it’s very difficult to do. Actually, I would distinguish between the worker cooperative as a governance model and an ownership model. Some of the other things that we do, like invest in training and investing in quality jobs, you could do that without worker ownership. And there are places that do that.

But Rick says he believes that a worker owned cooperative is the most comprehensive version of a labor-based home care company.

He raised a very interesting issue during our interview. About 15 years ago, the organization decided to voluntarily affiliate with a union. Rick says,

It was a good thing and a problem. It was a good thing because workers became part of a larger labor movement in New York City and the state. At the same time, we had to reallocate some of the rights and responsibilities that came with ownership, like deciding wages, and move that over to the collective bargaining agreement with the union. And that was a difficult process.

But he says that “people on both sides put a lot of effort into it to make it work and it has worked over the 15 years.” Rick says that there is a commitment to a “quality jobs, quality care approach”.