Paula Wilson has worked as ahome health-care aide in D.C. for 18 years. When she started in the profession in the 90s, she made $8 an hour. She was laid off from an agency in 2013, where she made $10.75 per hour, and now makes about$13 an hour working part-time for an elderly patient with Alzheimers.

She says the wages are not enough to pay rent or even take her son to the movies,and she was evicted from her apartment a couple of years ago. She and her son now live with her mother in the Capitol Heights area.

This is my job, this is my duty, Wilson said. Its an unacceptable wage.

Wilson joined hundreds of other D.C. home health-care workers Wednesday night at a town hall-style meeting in a Fort Totten church to rally for a $15 wage. The rally, which featured a keynote speech from U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, was the Districts workers official foray into the national Fight for $15 movement a movement inspired by the fast-food industrys push for higher wages.

D.C.s atleast 6,000 home health-care workers workfor about26 health-care agencies. Theywereorganized by Service Employees International Union 1199, the regional chapter of a national labor union thatput on Wednesdaysevent, though few of the workers are members of the union. D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) and the Rev. Graylan Hagler, a longtime activist andpastor of Plymouth United Congregational Church, where the event took place, also spoke at the event.

We need a million more [home health-care workers] in the next 10years, Norton said. They may have a hard time getting more of them if theyre not paying them.

The demand forhome health-care workersis fast growing in the United States, with more being needed as baby boomers grow older. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the country will need an additional 1 million such workers by 2022. According to a recent reportfrom the National Employment Law Project, the nations 2million home health-care workers took home an average salary of $18,598 in 2013, compared to the nationalaverage of $46,440 for salaried workers that year.

No one who works a full-time job should have to live in poverty, said Perez, who rallied workers to organize, with references to Selma and the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: You are not babysitters, you are professionals doing some of the most important work.

The Districts home health-careindustry made headlines last year when a long federal investigation revealedthat D.C. operators of home-care agencies and personal-care assistants had been running a Medicaid scheme, swindlingtaxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars. Because of the investigation, someagencies were cut off from Medicaid funding and, during this time, many homehealth care workers say they werent paid.

In December, some of D.C.s health-care workers filedsuit against three home-care agencies alleging that workers werent paid for all of their time and were not provided sick days. The suit, in which Wilson is a plaintiff, was later expanded to a class-action suit.

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D.C. home health-care workers organize to seek $15 an hour