One of the fastest growing jobs in America is can you guess? Caregiving? It's hard work, typically paid by the hour, and it involves giving assistance to other people as they go about their days, often feeding, dressing, and bathing them. Maria Martinez is the main caregiver for Agrippina Castellanos. Agrippina is ninety eight years old eeta la. These days, she's
still mostly independent inside her apartment. So I tell her, if you go to an assisted living home, you'll be sitting in a wheel chair all day, and you'll be going from the dining room table to your bed and back. Why because that's what they do at those places. They're afraid you'll fall down. So she says she'll stay here until she decides otherwise. On this edition of On the Job, From Hired to Retired, we've got the story of two women in Los Angeles, one of whom cares for the other,
although they both depend on each other. First, a word about our sponsor, Express Employment Professionals. Over the past thirty four years, Express Employment Professionals has put millions of people to work in meaningful and fulfilling jobs and careers. If you're looking for work or want to grow your workforce. Go to express prose dot com. By twenty sixty, there will be about ninety eight million people in the US over sixty five years of age, more than twice as
many as there are today. As our population continues to age and live longer, caregivers will be more important than ever. They will allow seniors to stay in their homes, and in some cases, caregivers will provide something quite simple. Friendship from Los Angeles or Sandra Guidi brings us the story of two women tied together by a job and by a bond that's much stronger. It's Friday. That's the day when Agrippina Castellanos goes to the hair salon for a
trim and a blowout every single week. Agrippina is sitting at the entrance of the salon, located on the first floor of her apartment building. She lives in Angeles Plaza, the nation's largest affordable senior housing project. It's home to more than four hundred people over sixty two at Agrippina is one of the elders here. I've been living here for many years, so many I don't even know, well, at least twenty six years. Because you were the first
one to move into your building. That's Maria Martinez helping Agrippina remembered dates. That's one of the many things she helps her with. Maria has been working for Agrippina for the past ten years. She's always sitting beside her wherever she goes. When Agrippina comes to get her haircut, Maria is there to help her push her walker towards the stylist chair. She holds Agrippina's purse for her, buys her snacks. Today she bought her a muffin, and she also tips
the hairdresser. But Maria wasn't trained for caregiving. She learned by doing it on the job. This is the case for the majority of family caregivers out there, who usually start out by watching after a child or parents or grandparents at home and without pay. Until she was in her mid forties, Maria had been a traditional stay at home housewife who raised four kids. She had never had a page job before, but as any mom would, she
knew how to take care of children. So one day, when a friend asked her to cover for her and caring for an elderly woman while she went on a medical leave, Maria decided to give it a shot. She quickly realized that caring for seniors wasn't much different from being a mom, something she had plenty of experience with. Maria would end up caring for that first client for about fifteen years, and then she heard that a fellow Mexican lady in the same building was looking for someone
to help her. Agribina had a reputation. She was very demanding of her caregivers. At first, the two of them struggled to find common ground. And she used to have a really tough personality. When I first started working for her, I was really afraid. When you went into her apartment before anything, you had to go wash your hands. She's always been extremely clean. I try to keep her home clean, but she's also not as rigid as she was before. In time, Agrippina has become more easy going and Maria
has learned to accept her quirks. That two of them are now close friends, or rather their relationship has evolved into something that resembles the closeness between a mother and a daughter. If she had wanted to go, she could have left to work for somebody else, but I haven't let her go. I love the way she is. We get along great yeah, I Maria is patient and reserved. Regardless of what Agrippina assessed to her, Maria tends to reply first with a smile. She makes eleven dollars an
hour as a caregiver. That's four dollars less than the minimum wage in Los Angeles, barely a livable wage, and she works eight hours a day from Monday through Sunday, every day of the week. We're listening to Roxandra Guidi's story of two women in Los Angeles. One is the other is her caregiver. Their relationship has deepened and changed over the ten years the two have been together. More
on that in a minute. This is On the Job from Hired to Retired, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. One company is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Sounds like a big number, doesn't it not to Express Employment Professionals seeking a skilled labor position or administrative work. Maybe you're an executive looking for a career that fits. We take pride in connecting
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Since her husband died of a stroke last year, Maria realized that she needed a new sense of purpose and she needed to find ways to get out of the house and stay active. So she made a decision to spend more time at work, and she's happy she did. She says it has only brought her closer to her client. She willingly spends more time in Agrippina's company than she gets paid for. I live relatively close to her her and every morning and every evening I give her a call.
If she doesn't answer in the evening, I just come on over immediately because I wonder what if she fell down, what if the phone isn't working. Sometimes she can't hear the phone, But I come anyway. Sometimes at nine or ten in the evening, after my shift is over, you'll find me here. In fact, Maria spends more time with Agrippina than she does with her own kids or grandkids, and it's not because she needs the money. She lives with one of her grown daughters and has little by
way of expenses, but she feels committed to her client. Psycho, I'm really a homebody. I'm somebody who loves to stay inside. So here I feel like I do at my own home because Agrippina treats me so well. When my husband died, my kids begged me to stop working, but I said, I can't do that. I can't leave Agrippina. Every day, Maria arrives at the apartment at about eight in the morning. Soon after, the two ladies will sit to chat over breakfast.
Maria will then help Agrippina take a shower and get dressed. Until recently, Agrippina used to be able to tie her own shoes, but now Maria must help her with those two. If there are bills to pay, Maria takes care of those, same for cleaning the apartment and shopping for food. Agrippina isn't too demanding about any of it anymore. Besides, they've been at it for a decade now. The thing she
most appreciates is having Maria's company. They like to sit on the couch and talk for hours or watch TV together. Of course, all of it is a lot of work for Maria. Even when she sits down to chat, she's doing so by way of caring for her clients. That the She's with me every day, and every single day
Maria's at home with me. She goes home and her shift is due, and but I am always confident that I'll see her the next day, even if she's late, and let's contain Researchers say that older adults are at an increased risk of being lonely. By the time people reach their eighties, the majority of them live on their own,
like Agribina does. As a long term risk factor, loneliness ranks alongside obesity and alcohol abuse, and according to a study from Brigham Young University, social isolation is just as likely to predict an early death as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The opposite is also true. Companionship leads to better physical health and longer lives, and caregiving in particular
can have far reaching benefits for seniors. They can fend off depression and chronic health conditions such as heart disease. Aside from their weekly session at the hair salon, Maria and Agribina follow another ritual every Sunday morning, they head to Agribina's favorite restaurant, Philips. It's been around for longer than she's been alive, and it's less than a ten minute drive from her apartment. Agribina has a big appetite. She eats a full plate of pancakes, fried eggs, and potatoes.
She has no serious health problems, takes no medications, but religiously does take her vitamins. My I barely go to the doctors. Not unless I have something that threatens to kill me, then I'll go to him. Otherwise, I'm looking for the good things in life so I can stick around longer, Arida. Later this summer, Agribina will turn She's the oldest in her family, and as old as Maria's mother would be if she were still alive. Maria is sixty five, old enough to retire herself, but she's not
planning to stop working anytime soon. It keeps her young, she says, and like Agribina, she prefers to be with other people rather than spending too much time alone inside her house. When they finished their Sunday breakfast, Maria helps Agribina get up from her chair. She takes her by the arm while Agripina holds on tightly to her walker
as they head towards the parking lot. In an ideal world, Maria says her adult children will take care of her when she needs their help, and they will be as patient with her as she is with Agribina, helping her along. Once she slows down, they will spend time with her every a and if she's lucky, they'll take her out once a week to her favorite restaurant. We've been listening
to the story of two women. One is sixty five, the other is nine, and the younger woman cares for the older woman in Los Angeles, and they've also become friends and the caregiver, Maria tells us that she spends many unpaid hours not only thinking about her client, but spending some extra time with her as well. So I
wanted to talk about caregiving with Gene Axius. He's vice president of Independent Living and long Term Services and Support at a a r P where I used to work, and he closely follows the family caregiving landscape and the caregiving landscape in general. Let's start at the beginning, and we read a lot today about our aging society, So tell me what that means for you, how is the society aging? Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I think that's a very fascinating question.
We know that the population is aging. There are ten thousand people that are turning sixty five each day and that's gonna continue for the next several years. We know that not only are people aging into the age of sixty five, but they're also living longer. So you have this whole idea that people are getting older and they're living longer. And as a result of those two very
fascinating what I would refer to as gifts. It really creates some interesting conversations and some things that we have to think about as a society in terms of how do we actually meet people where they are, how do we provide the services that they need to live their best lives, and more importantly, how do we ensure that we are creating solutions that really help people in their
everyday life. Okay, now, in terms of home caregiving, like in our story, for seniors who need some help, do you break things up into you know, unpaid family caregiving, partly paid like our example, and fully professional caregiving. Are there ways that you break up the landscape there. So we know that there are over forty billion unpaid family caregiteris in this country, that the typical caregiver is a woman daughter cared for her parents who has some long
term condition. We know that in addition to that, that of all unpaid family caregivers are men, which typically surprises a lot of people, but they are also stepping up really to provide this type of care. Again because of the population that's that's aging, uh, and also because of the fact that the family size is shrinking over time, that you have the situation where who's going to take
care of me? Right? So it's our hands on deck. Um. So we know that there's over forty million family caregivers um who are unpaid, and that the economic value I mean that if you were to actually put a dollar to that contribution would be over four hundred seventy billion dollars a year. Four and seventy billion with a b
fo seventy billion with a bow. That that's kind of amazing. Now, one of the things I was curious about and and would be a service to our listeners who were just thinking about this, not necessarily going out to get a job, but is there a way that unpaid family caregivers can fund through some sort of a system to be paid by by a government entity or somehow. There are some programs they're known as UH self directed programs programs that
are typically covered through the Medicaid program. UH it's it's really designed for people with limited resources who are eligible for Medicaid and UM the vast majority of states actually provides some self directed programs, which means that as a Medicaid beneficiary, you're able to hire people to help you with your care and dictate exactly when they actually come to provide that care and the type of care that they actually provide. It really depends on a state by
state basis. Okay, and only I want to ask you one more question. I know that your area of expertise is partly the unpaid family caregiving, But if you were to talk with someone who was interested in this kind of work, do you think caregiving some sort of caregiving would be something that would be a good option for someone that there'll be a need in society for more and better caregivers. So you're talking to someone who actually
had the opportunity. My first job was working in the retirement community, and I had the opportunity to actually work in the dining room. And this was when I was in high school, and I had the opportunity to work breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I enjoyed it so much that I actually spent my entire saturdays as UH in working in the retirement community. And I can tell you that it's
it's extremely rewarding. And part of the reason why I did it was because of the fact that I felt as if I had an opportunity to really connect with
the residents at the retirement community. I think for me, the other aspect of this was what of selfishness in a sense because of the fact that it gave me a rare opportunity to sit with residents who UH have a lifetime worth of wisdom and experience, and to hear their stories and to hear what they've learned over their course of their life, UH, to hear some of the things that they regret, to hear some of the things that they wish they could have done. So I am
about a person because of that. So I do think that caregiving has both its rewarding aspects, both in terms of UH, the ability to connect, the ability to understand and to benefit from that transfer of knowledge and wisdom. Uh. And I think that there are some benefits to really meeting people and getting a great taste as to what it means to be a servant to someone else. Wow, that's that's fabulous. Thanks so much for spending a few
minutes with Thank you. Gene Acts is vice president of Independent Living and Long Term Services and Support at a A r P in Washington, d C. Thank you so much. It's all for this edition of On the Job from Hired to Retired, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at Express prose dot com. Special thanks to producer Roxandra Guidi. Music for this episode by Steve Mencher and ghost licensed under creative Comments by CC Mixed.
This podcast is produced by Steve Mencher for Mention Media, Red Seat Ventures and I Heart Radio. Find us on I Heart Radio and iTunes, where we hope you will leave a nice review which helps other folks find us too, and of course you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time On the Job