Kids' Work Chicago Daycare
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Every day, working parents across the country drop off their children at homes away from home. It might be a small play space in a relative’s apartment, or a neighbor’s basement converted into a mini classroom. But home-based daycare is an indispensable pillar in the nation’s economy, a nurturing place for children, and a crucial resource for working parents. And, in California, it will soon be a union shop.
California just became one of only a dozen states nationwide to give home-based childcare workers the right to unionize and collectively bargain. After years of campaigning, labor groups are celebrating the September passage of AB 378, which enables unionization for home-based daycare providers who currently receive government subsidies—which would enable an estimated 40,000 individuals statewide to negotiate a contract directly with the government. This could give one of California’s least visible workforces a new platform to advocate for reform of a system rife with overpriced services and underpaid workers.
With this new law, California joins New Mexico, Illinois, Connecticut, Minnesota, Maryland, New Jersey, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island in allowing child care providers to collectively negotiate with the state, like any other public sector union, over wages, health care, and other job protections.
“This law is not only going to be good for us. It’s going to help the community,” says Patricia Moran, who runs a daycare out of her home in San Jose. “As soon as we’re going to have our negotiation, our rights, we can start talking about the children we are taking care of.”
Moran loves to talk about the children she cares for, because she’s proud of them. Their parents often work long hours, some of them juggling two jobs. She teaches, feeds, and plays with twelve kids, working twelve-hour days and sometimes more when parents are late picking them up after work.
“For me, a child is like a butterfly in my hands.”
The state’s subsidy payments—which the state sets at a maximum of about $1,200 a month for licensed child care providers in Santa Clara County—are stretched paper-thin. Moran pays $15 an hour for her assistant, maintains the overhead costs of living in one of California’s most expensive counties, and sometimes buys extras for kids in struggling families, like toys and second-hand clothes. In the end, she says she’s left earning about four dollars an hour. But she remains committed to her “passion.”
“For me, a child is like a butterfly in my hands,” Moran says. “It's like you are [either] going to support the butterfly to fly far away, really high, or you are going to squish it in your hands.”
According to the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center, of the roughly 4.2 million children aged twelve or younger of working parents in California, about 2.9 million are in need of care. Some 1.6 million of those kids are eligible for childcare subsidies for low-income families, but are not enrolled in the system due to the underfunded program’s limited capacity.
That means millions of California kids are denied access to professional early childhood education, at tremendous personal and public cost. Not only is it key for a child’s personal development, as the Labor Center notes, high quality early childhood education has “an even greater impact on the state’s economy by increasing the employment, earnings, and productivity of parents.”
But for most California families, the cost of infant care, about $17,000 a year, is prohibitive. The state ranks third in childcare costs—expensive enough to exclude childcare workers themselves, who would need to spend nearly two-thirds of their income to provide daycare for their own children.
Home-based daycare providers make up about half of California’s more than 200,000 early childhood education workers, licensed as well as non-licensed, and serve about 300,000 children statewide. Some are officially licensed but others are relatives, friends, or neighbors who establish small-scale, license-exempt home-based facilities, allowable under state law. Many of those rely completely on subsidy payments (a combination of state and federal funds) for income.
Although home-based childcare providers are typically low income, and many are financed wholly through the state subsidies received by their low-income clients, they are technically self-employed business owners, exempted from such basic labor protections as minimum wage and workers’ compensation. Advocates say the high stress and low pay drives extreme turnover rates, sometimes exceeding 30 percent each year. California has lost about 11,785 licensed home-based providers, or about 30 percent of the total, since 2008, while the number of daycare centers has remained steady.
Nationwide, a typical home-based child care worker’s pay is stuck at an unlivable $10.35 an hour, according to Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. For comparison, school-based prekindergarten teachers make an average $26.88 per hour.
Home-based childcare workers generally have less formal education and fewer opportunities for further career training, limiting their career prospects. The pay gaps are even wider for black and Latinx workers, who make up the majority of sector (paralleling the mostly non-white population of children under five in California).
The gap between demand and supply for childcare is what drove Charlotte Neal into the profession. After years of working with youth involved in the criminal legal system, she started a home-based childcare program in Sacramento because “I wanted to make a difference in kids’ lives and try to catch them before they fall into the system.” But helping at-risk youth is becoming harder since her business is at risk of going under.
“It’s a struggle to juggle each month,” Neal says. “We’re struggling to stay open.”
The Economic Policy Institute argues that a more stable and financially sustainable childcare workforce would pave the way for an expansion of subsidized care for hundreds of thousands of children statewide. The work of teaching young children, performed primarily by African American and Hispanic women, needs to be recognized as an invaluable occupation, and early care and education should no longer be financed through low teacher pay.
Through AB 378, union organizers plan to unionize up to 40,000 workers under a new labor group, the Childcare Providers Union—a hybrid of two SEIU locals and the domestic workers’ local of the state’s other major public service worker union, AFSCME. The new union would represent the dispersed childcare workforce in negotiating subsidy rates and working conditions with the state, as well as assisting with grievance procedures to give workers more leverage in the workplace.
In Illinois, one of the other states that has granted collective bargaining rights for home-based childcare workers, unionization has been associated with higher rates of licensure—suggesting that unionization helps ensure that the sector provides more consistent, regulated care.
The new union plans to push for a dramatic expansion of the subsidy program to cover all financially eligible families, while at the same time ensuring that childcare providers are all compensated equitably. As Childcare Providers Union organizer Jono Shaffer told me in an email, “Achieving that goal will take many years of organizing in coalition with parents and others, but it has been central to our vision of making sure every child has access to affordable, quality childcare, regardless of what neighborhood you come from.”
As she looks forward to building her union, Neal says her demands as a childcare worker are aligned with the demands of families and other community members: “We come from all different walks of life, but we all have the same struggle with this childcare system. And so once we have collective bargaining, it’s better for us, it’s better for our parents, and it’s better for California’s workforce as well.”