Dwayne Clark: You wrote the book. Time to read it.

Business is booming for senior living facilities — and Seattle-based Aegis Living is bringing in over $200 million in yearly revenue across three states.¹

But it’s been over eleven months since workers at Aegis Living’s Ravenna location voted to form a union with SEIU 775… and Aegis executives have failed to complete union contract negotiations with frontline workers. For over a month, Aegis has refused to even respond to the union’s proposal to increase pay.

Believe it or not, Aegis CEO Dwayne Clark wrote the book on how to treat workers — literally. His self-published manifesto, Help Wanted: Recruiting, Hiring, and Retaining Exceptional Staff has been touted (by himself) as “​​a toolkit for success for anyone who knows employees are critical to the success of their company.”²

It looks like Dwayne is struggling to take his own advice — so we thought we’d help him out with a few tips of our own.

1. Share the wealth.

Aegis is now worth almost $3 billion, and Dwayne Clark has reportedly managed to scrape together over $500 million for himself.3,4 But while Aegis hiked up resident fees this year, that money isn’t making its way to the people actually doing the work. Most of us are still getting paid just two-thirds of Seattle’s living wage, and it’s not clear where the increased resident fees are actually going.5

2. Workers want wages, not charity.

Instead of getting a living wage and decent benefits, we get the “Potato Soup Foundation” — a tax-exempt charity Dwayne set up with the sole purpose of helping Aegis employees in financial crisis. The kicker: it’s funded by donations we “can choose to give” from our very own paychecks.6

Dwayne brags on his website that the foundation has helped workers with “emergency medical treatment” and “housing” — in other words, the basic costs of living that should be covered by wages & benefits. When you pay your workers what we need to get by, we don’t have to rely on crowdsourcing from our coworkers to make ends meet.

3. Low pay and short staffing mean compromised care for residents.

When we can’t make ends meet or get the respect we deserve, we have no choice but to find another job. Turnover and understaffing have a real impact on our residents. Aegis is a high-end facility with high-end prices to match… but they were forced to pay out $16 million to WA & CA residents after a class-action lawsuit claiming that Aegis Senior Communities LLC violated consumer protection and elder abuse laws by misleading residents and families about staffing levels.7 As workers, we care deeply about our residents and we see what short staffing means on the ground: inconsistent care.

4. Listen to your workers.

Staff at Aegis Ravenna voted to unionize over ten months ago — but Aegis management has slow-walked the bargaining process and delayed raises for frontline staff since March. Instead of spending residents’ dollars on a whole team of union-busting “consultants,” use it to pay the people actually doing the work.

Dwayne Clark: You literally wrote the book on how to retain workers. If you won’t take it from yourself, take it from us: it’s time to get your act together.

Sign on to tell Aegis CEO Dwayne Clark to stop delaying and negotiate a fair union contract with frontline workers.

References:

  1. Fortune (2023), Aegis Living. “U.S. Revenue: $235,048,970.”

  2. Google Books, Help Wanted: Recruiting, Hiring and Retaining Exceptional Staff.

  3. Talentify, Aegis job posting. “We are approaching $3 billion in real estate assets...”

  4. Investor Times (2023), Dwayne Clark Net Worth. “As of 2023, Dwayne Clark’s estimated net worth is $500 million.”

  5. Seattle Times (2023), WA renters need to earn twice the minimum wage to afford rent. “A new data analysis released Wednesday found that a Washington renter needs to earn $30.33 an hour to afford the typical one-bedroom apartment in the state without spending more than 30% of their income on housing costs, a standard measure of affordability. In the Seattle and Bellevue area, a renter would need to make even more: $40.38, or $84,000 a year.”

  6. Dwayne J. Clark’s personal website, The Potato Soup Foundation. “Donations are collected both within those communities – for example, employees can choose to give 25 cents out of each paycheck to the foundation…”

  7. McKnights Senior Living, Aegis Living settles staffing lawsuit for $16.25 million despite ‘fervently disputed’ allegations. “The suit argued the practice violated elder abuse and consumer protection laws, and left facilities understaffed and residents’ needs unmet.”