Quality Staff or Any Staff?

Published July 14, 2009 @ 09:22AM PT

The California Regional Center which both Kristina and I blogged about in rapid succession last week has decided to return the money to the state. Whether this decision was good or bad--like the initial decision to spend the money on staff pay raises--is (as I stated in my last post and readers also pointed out) ambiguous.

On one hand, there is a connection between rate of pay and quality of worker. Additionally, there is a connection between rate of pay and employee morale. Even someone with no sense of money, number, or time like me has been known to do crappy work with a bad attitude when being insufficiently compensated for the work, financially or otherwise. Just loving the work isn't always enough, and not everyone in the service field really loves the work either. And, trying to avoid personal details here, my experience has been that $60 an hour assistants are a whole lot more helpful to me than $10 an hour assistants.

On the other hand, it doesn't matter how quality the staff are if you don't actually get any staff. So having any staff to pay at all is arguably a prerequisite to discussions about pay raises. (Cuts to services of course affecting the providers and the end users alike.)

Is it better for a small number of well paid staff to provide services to a small number of individuals but at the expense of quantity? Or is it better for a large number of poorly paid staff to provide services to a larger number of individuals but at the expense of quality?

What's best of course is a large number of well paid staff providing services to a large number of individuals--both quality and quantity.

But does that ideal have any real impact on the reality of the situation in California? Are there any "good" answers regarding the situation in California?

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Dora is committed to improving quality of life for individuals on the autistic spectrum--including herself! She is Co-director of the Academic Autistic Spectrum Partnership in Research and Education and a member of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network's Board of Directors.