Two years of mounting agitation by fast-food workers will culminate in acts of civil disobedience and a nationwide work stoppage on Thursday, organizers say. And while members of the public and boosters from other industries have previously come out in support, this round of protests will emphasize the commonality between fast-food employees and another low-wage group: home care workers.

The 2.1 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has organized home health attendants since the early 1980s and, in recent years, invested heavily in the Fast Food Forward campaign, aiming to recruit thousands or tens of thousands of members from this mammoth, global service sector. As organizers prepare for Thursday’s protests outside McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and other restaurants, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry has called on the country's million-plus home-based workers serving the elderly and disabled to join these street actions and the push for a $15 minimum wage. (A McDonald's spokeswoman would not comment on the planned actions, except to say, "We would hope that any protestors will obey the law and demonstrate in a respectful fashion.")

The pairing of these disparate workforces comes at a critical juncture: A recent Supreme Court case has weakened home care workers' ability to form and sustain a union; fast-food workers, on the other hand, hope to transform their loose network of protesters into a formal union.

Hundreds of thousands of home care workers — mostly women of color and immigrants — are currently represented by service- and public-sector unions such as SEIU, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Thirty years ago, however, personal care aides and other domestic workers were considered unorganizable: isolated on long, physically demanding shifts in their clients' homes. It seemed impossible to find all of them, let alone negotiate one-to-one employment contracts. But because they were paid with public dollars through Medicaid and Medicare, worker outreach was combined with a legislative tactic to deem the state their "employer" for collective-bargaining purposes.

In states not entirely hostile to organized labor, unions lobbied for statutes and executive orders opening up this path, and, through subsequent contract negotiations, wages and benefits improved. Yet many caregivers remain unorganized and paid just above the minimum wage. Veteran health aide Jasmin Almodovar supports herself and her 11-year-old son on $9.50 an hour, shuffling from one client's house to the next. On a given shift, her duties range from cleaning and cooking to bathing clients, performing physical therapy and picking up medication. As part of a home-care organizing campaign in Cleveland, she plans to join Thursday's actions for a $15 minimum wage. "It's all for the same cause," she said. "We're all underpaid, overworked and not treated fairly."

But in June, the Supreme Court made it more difficult for home-care workers to organize. In Harris v. Quinn, it ruled that Illinois's publicly paid health aides are "partial" or quasi-public employees exempt from the automatic deduction of union dues. The decision as applied could allow home attendants to opt out of union membership and dues while continuing to reap any benefits from the collective-bargaining process. A potential class-action lawsuit filed by caregivers in Washington state relies on this precedent to argue that "the compelled union membership and dues requirement violates individual providers' First Amendment rights." According to Wright Noel, the plaintiffs' attorney, the union is "not negotiating a salary with an employer. It's much closer to petitioning the legislature to set a pay rate for independent providers, and it's less than what the providers were receiving prior to when SEIU was involved."