Elder Care Startup Honor Makes Contractors Full-Time Workers With Equity

[Recursion]

Source: TechCrunch

Honor, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed company focused on caring for seniors as Baby Boomers tip over into retirement, is making its contractor workforce into a full-time one.

The care workers, called CarePros within the company, will have the potential for stock options.

...

"Lots of people told us we would fail. We expected that CarePros would churn between 60 and 100 percent," he said. "But our churn is virtually zero. We want to be able to train CarePros, grow them and create a path for advancement."

The other piece that makes Honor’s business unique from other on-demand companies is that this type of work isn’t really fungible. You can’t replace a care worker with another care worker as seamlessly as you can move from one Uber driver to the next. Care workers often have long-term relationships with families and sometimes, they’ll need special training to work with medical conditions or specific care or feeding routines.

Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/20/elder-care-startup-honor-makes-contractors-full-time-workers-with-equity/

[Babel_17]

1. My sister-in-law takes care of her very elderly mother

The agencies she deals with seem to rely on temp workers. They're great people, and thank god for the way New York City devotes resources to the elderly, but having people able to work full time is better for everyone.

[radhika]

2. I'd love to see Care-Giver Co-ops being created...

Worker/owner co-ops, specifically. Indeed, good care=fivers are not fungible, and they are woefully unsupported by the labor laws of many states.

IMHO, caregivers getting together to create and manage their own co-ops of licensed and vetted quality caregivers is an idea whose time may have come. Control of working conditions, equity positions and shared working conditions.