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American, Latina, and they provided care for people who were sick and disabled, who could not get around and needed someone to come into their home to care for them. So at that time, home-care workers were making --

What level of care was it?

It's like an aide. They were aides. They would do the shopping, do the cooking, dress the person, move them in a wheelchair. Not everybody could be eligible. People who were frail, elderly, sick, who couldn't manage by themselves, and they cared for them. One of the workers, I remember, said, “I'm a sister, a brother. I do everything for this person. It's like he's my family.” But the conditions were abominable. The workers made $4.15 an hour.

Four-five-oh?

Four-one-five. They worked twenty-hour shifts, no benefits, and one worker testified that for sixteen years she worked seven days a week without overtime pay, which was typical.

The first thing that we did is we persuaded the borough president, David Dinkins, to hold a public hearing on home-care workers, where workers would testify as to the conditions, and we started to get media to cover it. When the workers testified, they described these wages and conditions, and we then went to the media to try to get response.

In '87, we did a big media campaign, which included Newsday did a week-long series of features, starting on the front page: “Home-care Workers: The Shame of New York City,” in which they interviewed workers, different workers, described everything in great detail, interviewed the management, what their answer was, and it was really a condemning but also very enlightening and supportive series.

How did that come about? What was your role at this point?

I immediately saw that home care was very much like 59, in that it's the kind of issue that could attract large PR attention. I began to call around, contacts, people I knew, to try to interest them, and as a result, you have the Newsday series, you have the Times, the Post, all of the papers running. We had radio and TV editorials coming out condemning it and supporting the need for change in this.

Maybe this would a good time to just interrupt and talk a little bit about that process of placing stories, which is something that you have been particularly successful at. What are the requirements to do that well? How do you go about that kind of a campaign?