Caregivers pay the price
Neville Pottinger is accustomed to elected officials playing politics with his paycheck, but he will never understand why the first workers targeted in budget battles on Beacon Hill so often are the ones with incomes so low that many qualify for food stamps.
Pottinger is 61, a 23-year employee of a nonprofit agency under contract with the state to provide vocational, residential, and support services to individuals with mental retardation. He makes $28,000 a year. Governor Mitt Romney just revoked the less than $10-a-week pay raise that the Massachusetts Legislature promised Pottinger and more than 30,000 other direct-care workers last summer.
"I was expecting it," Pottinger said with some resignation about the elusive pay increase. The raise, retroactive to July 1 when the state's fiscal year began, was to have been reflected in a big check delivered the first week in December. "It would help with the electricity bill and the gas prices," Pottinger said. "It is very strange to me. If government is supposed to help people, why would he choose to cut those of us whose job it is to help people?"
Why indeed?
Romney would have us believe that it was not his presidential aspirations but a looming fiscal crisis that forced him to use his emergency powers to hack $425 million from the state's $25.7 billion budget. But even the ever-cautious Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation has said that tax revenues are coming in at such an encouraging rate that the cuts might well prove unnecessary, especially so early in the fiscal year.
If Romney wants to establish his credentials as a tough fiscal manager, why rescind $28 million earmarked for pay increases for those who take care of the blind and the disabled, who work in juvenile detention facilities, or who work with adults with mental retardation? No one is getting rich giving sponge baths to the disabled. Everyone who anticipated these miniscule pay raises makes less than $40,000 a year; most make less than $25,000. If there is fat in the state budget, it is not in this line item.
Pottinger could make more money somewhere else, but he drives between his home in Medford and his job in Reading every day to help men and women perform the simple tasks that yield them a small financial stipend and a large dose of self-esteem. He has known some of his clients so long he could not imagine seeking other, better-paying employment. "We keep afloat," he said of himself and his wife, a low-wage hospital worker, with whom he has raised six children. All of them "are doing better than we are," he said with a laugh that was both bemused and grateful.
Pottinger's long tenure in human services is the exception in Massachusetts, according to Tina Claydon, the residential director for ARC of East Middlesex, the nonprofit charitable corporation that pays Pottinger under its contract with the state Department of Mental Retardation. "Our turnover is very high. We have to recruit people from overseas because the wages are below the level most people here will accept."
It is not unprecedented, Claydon said, for a high-functioning client living in a group home to earn more money at a job than the direct-care worker providing residential support. "Is it any wonder we can't keep workers?" she asked.
In a letter to Senate President Robert E . Travaligni and House Speaker Salvatore F . DiMasi this week, Grace Healey, executive director of the Association of Developmental Disabilities Providers, compared Romney to the Grinch who stole Christmas. "Workers knew that they would soon receive a significant check that would help them through the holidays, which makes this action even more hurtful," she wrote.
There are those on Beacon Hill who argue there is plenty of time in January for lawmakers to restore the cuts. Why rush back into formal session before the holidays to undo the damage that most lawmakers agree these cuts will cause?
Why? Neville Pottinger is why.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
