Retirement benefits are increasingly hard to come by in any career—but for Washington’s state-paid Home Care Aides (HCAs), both Individual and Agency Providers, that hard-won benefit has arrived in the form of a pension fund. It is the first such savings plan for HCAs in the country.

The pension is a retirement benefit 12 years in the making, according to the Secure Retirement Trust, an organization within the SEIU 775 Benefits Group family that will administer the pension. The Trust says this is the result of “years of cooperative research between the union and the state to get to a model that worked for our unique workforce.”

In a nutshell, the pension benefit will work like this: The state will pay 23 cents per hour worked into a privately managed retirement fund.

That money is earmarked for HCAs, who will receive a set amount when they retire. Like Social Security (which is itself a type of pension), pensions are paid out in regular installment payments throughout retirement.

All of the SEIU 775 represented HCA employees will be enrolled – both Individual Providers (IPs) and Agency Providers (APs). The contract covers 33,000 home care workers paid by the state as well as funding that would extend the benefits to 12,000 HCAs employed by private agencies that serve Medicaid clients.

The Trust chose a pension-style retirement plan because it was the best way to get a better return on the contributions put into it.

Private pensions have a long history in the United States. The first employer-provided plan was started by American Express in 1875. The idea was popular and spread quickly; by 1940, pensions covered more than 4 million active workers.

Pensions boomed throughout that decade, and during that time, after World War II, unions began to include pension benefits as part of their worker advocacy, alongside increased wages. In 1948, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that employers had to include pensions as part of the bargaining process, which solidified the role of unions in negotiating them.

These days, union workers are more likely to be covered by pension plans than non-union workers (67 percent compared with 13 percent in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Corporations are also dropping pensions in favor of other types of retirement savings plans that are cheaper for employers, such as 401Ks. Add to that cost-of-living increases outpacing wage increases and the idea of retirement savings has become more of a luxury than a necessity for many people.

Currently, the Secure Retirement Trust is working on funding the pension and planning details, which will include a timeline of when members can expect benefits to start.

The Secure Retirement Trust will update members as more information is available. Long term, the goal is “to build from a startup to the type of fund that can help Home Care Aides retire with the dignity they deserve.”