Partnerships and Politics

“When you fight in numbers, you win.” – Pamela Franks, Illinois home child care provider

Cultivating and exercising political power has taken a number of forms for care workers over the past 40 years. Other than the centrality of community organizing strategies described above, partnerships with other allied constituencies help build worker power and momentum for change. Likewise, identifying those in office or pursuing political office who could be persuaded to champion care workers’ priorities can facilitate improved working conditions and job quality.

While gaining union recognition and collective bargaining rights constitutes the gold standard for improving job quality, workers have been able to make strides before or without such status with community organizing strategies which helped improve conditions for workers even without union recognition or collective bargaining rights. As an example, home care workers across Illinois had joined SEIU 880 and organized direct actions and solidarity campaigns to push state policymakers to raise their pay in the 1980s and 1990s. Using community organizing principles focusing on personal connection, breadth of outreach, and coordinated action, Illinois home health workers garnered approximately ten pay raises before their union was officially recognized in 2003.

A more recent example, Organizers in the Land of Enchantment and partner organizations in New Mexico won, through long, concerted community organizing efforts, hazard pay for child care teachers early in the COVID-19 pandemic, and passage of a bill allocating a share of the state’s permanent land grant fund to early care and education.¹ Given that a lack of public investment is the greatest barrier to improved wages and benefits for child care workers, this additional, codified funding stream has the potential to improve job quality for child care workers across the state.²

Forming Alliances and Partnerships

Forming alliances with key constituencies, particularly those receiving care from these essential workers, is critical to providing high-quality care and fighting for improved job quality for workers.

Older adults and people with disabilities in states that use consumer-directed Medicaid home care models have considerable power and can make strong partners for care workers. These groups can coalesce around shared goals of improving and expanding quality home care through higher public investment. In California, seniors and disability rights groups became critical partners in the early days of organizing home care workers, partly because both constituencies were already well organized, with advocacy groups operating across the state. While the disability rights community’s perspective is often aligned with that of care workers, tension may occasionally arise around issues such as requiring or incentivizing health care training for care workers. This can be perceived as medicalizing clients’ disabilities and as removing clients’ ability to train their own caregivers in the type and manner of care they require.

Care workers and organizers should prioritize building close and early relationships with the disability rights community and working together to further shared interests around quality and stability of care. Rebecca Gutman of SEIU 1199 United Healthcare Workers East (UHW-East) in Massachusetts pointed to close partnerships with the disability rights community as a means of building and amplifying each other’s power. She said, “I think there is a shared narrative that some of the wins that we have had over time … neither community would have won without the other.” Forming relationships with senior groups can also be useful in working to improve home care. Partnerships with care worker unions or other organizations around pushing for increased funding can be particularly useful.

In the child care sector, different alliances between workers and other constituencies have elevated worker power and efforts to improve care. Parents can be organized as powerful allies of child care workers. In Seattle, child care providers partnered with parents throughout the mid-late 1990s to push for increased wages.³ In 1999, Gov. Gary Locke (D-Wash,) funded a pilot program with improved wages after pressure from this coalition.⁴ Partnerships among unions have proven indispensable for family child care worker organizing in California. SEIU, United Domestic Workers of America (UDW), and AFSCME partnered to push for collective bargaining rights for family child care providers rather than separately working to pursue this aim. The resulting union, Child Care Providers United, is now officially recognized in the state and is currently in the collective bargaining process for its first contract.

History

In 2005, the Governor of Washington issued an executive directive allowing all home-based child care providers to organize. By November of that year, over 90 percent of family child care providers had voted to join SEIU Local 925. One year later, the 925 won legislation granting explicit collective bargaining rights to subsidized family child care and family, friend, and neighbor providers, designating them as state employees for the purposes of collective bargaining.⁵ Additionally, the providers who do not participate in the subsidy program were granted the right to union representation for the purposes of shaping the regulatory requirements that apply to them. The first contract was approved in November 2006, which included subsidy rate increases (10 percent over two years) and additional financial incentives to care for infants and to provide care after hours. Starting in 2008, subsidized family child care providers received health insurance. However, none received the right to strike.

Facilitating Conditions

Unionization efforts in Washington were led by a coalition of parents, workers, and labor. Workers were able to organize parents to effectively advocate for their children and those who cared for them, resulting in increased wages for workers.⁶

Although workers had been unionized in many areas in Washington state before 2005, it was only when workers were granted explicit collective bargaining rights from the legislature that they were able to bargain at the state level. This closed the gap in wages between places like Seattle, which had been more active in the union before state recognition, and more rural areas of the state.

Demographics

According to the Migration Policy Institute, in Washington, this workforce is 96 percent female. As far as the racial and ethnic composition of the child care workforce, 72 percent identify as white, 14 percent as Latinx, 8 percent as Asian, and 5 percent as Black.

Successes and Benefits for Workers

Overall, workers have won access to higher wages, retirement benefits, better training, and overall better working conditions.

Since workers have organized through SEIU 925, rates for family child care providers have gone up by over one-third. The 925 also recently helped create a substitute provider pool and achieved significant wage gains of up to 20 percent for some providers.⁷ However, wages are still very low, and the pandemic has been extraordinarily difficult for these workers.

Continued Challenges

There is simply not enough money for child care. There is only room for 17 percent of eligible children in state programs, and it continues to be extremely difficult to find workers to go into this field. Demand far outpaces the state’s ability to provide care.

The Politics of State Leadership

State political leadership can empower or stymie worker organizing. It is critical for workers and allied constituencies to identify and engage federal, state, and local candidates and politicians currently in office who could be convinced to champion key policy goals of organized care workers. SEIU workers in Illinois, still not recognized or able to collectively bargain in the early 2000s, realized they would make little additional progress in securing better quality work without political leadership that was friendlier to organized labor. Therefore, they devoted their energy to electing Democrat Rod Blagojevich governor. Shortly thereafter, Blagojevich followed through on a campaign promise, and the state recognized SEIU 880 and began the collective bargaining process for home care workers.

While workers in California, Illinois, and Washington have all benefited from Democratic governors’ executive orders to gain collective bargaining rights, a governor alone may not be able to maintain or improve wages and benefits for these workers. Even with a generally supportive state legislature, Illinois child care providers remain reliant on the support of the governor. Bruce Rauner, in office 2015–2019, was hostile to organized labor and failed to implement child care reimbursement rate increases passed by the General Assembly.⁸ SEIU HCII sued the state. Rauner’s successor, J. B. Pritzker, implemented the rate increases previously passed by the state legislature under Rauner, with back pay for workers in the most recent contract, in effect until 2023.

While Democrats are typically more likely to facilitate improved job quality for care workers than Republicans, Democratic party affiliation is no guarantee of labor-friendly policymaking. California child care providers had been organizing for years, but were not granted the right to collectively bargain until Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) signed the legislation. His predecessor, Democrat Jerry Brown, was not a strong proponent of child care and in fact quelled workers’ efforts to win collective bargaining rights, as had Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. Strategic connection with political candidates and attempts to secure their support, with the combined voices of care workers, care recipients, and other allied groups, can have significant implications for the future.

History

Family child care providers in California who care for children receiving subsidies have been fighting for the right to have a union negotiate with the state on their behalf for over 17 years. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.) vetoed bills that would have authorized statewide bargaining for family child care providers in 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008, citing concerns over higher costs that could reduce the number of children receiving care. Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) vetoed a similar bill in 2011, pointing to concerns over the bill’s impact on the state budget.⁹ Finally, in September 2019, Gov. Newsom signed legislation that granted the approximately 40,000 family child care providers in the state who receive subsidies the right to collectively bargain and organize. In July 2020, about 10,000 providers overwhelmingly voted to join Child Care Providers United, a partnership of the SEIU and the AFSCME. For the first time, California's family child care providers have a union empowered to negotiate with the state for higher pay and better training.

What Facilitating Conditions in this State Led to Worker Organizing?

A crucial component of the successful effort to gain collective bargaining rights was the collaboration between unions. While it was Newsom who signed the bill finally giving family child care providers the right to collectively bargain, providers had been working with their local unions for over a decade to win significant victories, such as payment rate increases that followed successful union efforts to raise the minimum wage. Due to the fact that so many decisions affecting family child care providers serving subsidized families occur at the state level, SEIU and AFSCME member leaders and staff realized early that collaborating around joint decisions and creating a unified state strategy would make the greatest impact on behalf of providers. The union that formed to represent providers in their newly won right to collectively bargain is a partnership between SEIU and AFSCME.

Demographics

Precise demographics of the California child care workforce are notoriously difficult to obtain due to the lack of a statewide workforce registry or an updated statewide survey. According to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, there were approximately 116,800 people as of 2019 that made up the state’s early childhood educator workforce, not including self-employed workers such as family child care providers. The average wage for a child care worker in 2019 was $13.43/hour¹⁰ and nearly 60 percent of the state’s early educators live in families that rely on public support.¹¹ The workforce is overwhelmingly female: While gender data is not available for family child care providers, 97 percent of center-based child care providers in California were women in 2012 and over two-thirds of family child care providers were people of color.¹²

Success/Benefits for Workers

The newly formed Child Care Providers United union has already secured tangible benefits for its members. In the union’s first major victory, the legislature approved $144 million in federal funds to provide financial relief to providers in the wake of COVID-19. The funds will be used to give providers one-time stipends of $525 per child in subsidized care as of November 2020, allow 16 additional paid non-operational days for COVID-19 closures, and form a working group of union and state representatives to review how to provide additional financial relief for providers through the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.¹³ In April 2021, the union secured a second COVID-19 funding agreement which, if approved by the legislature, will provide family child care providers hundreds of thousands of dollars of financial support to address economic hardships caused by the pandemic.¹⁴ The union is currently in negotiations with the state to finalize its first master contract that will include details about reimbursement rates, training and professional development opportunities, benefits, and grievance arbitration.

Continued Challenges

Insufficient public funding at both the federal and state level is an ongoing challenge in the early care and education field. Family child care providers in California and elsewhere operate on very thin margins, resulting in low earnings which make it unlikely they will earn health benefits or accrue savings for retirement. Reimbursement rates paid to providers who accept subsidies are not tied to the true cost of care, so even when these rates are raised, they still might not be high enough to significantly increase the earnings of family child care providers to a livable level or allow them to pay their assistants a livable wage.