John Hersey
Rosa Carreño, a child care provider in San Jose, California, for 19 years, begins her day before 4 a.m. Her entire home is dedicated to the early learning she provides for her young charges, who arrive as early as 6 a.m. The school-age children are in her care before and after school; in between, she cares for and educates at least one infant and several toddlers, feeding them three home-cooked meals and two snacks every day. The last children are picked up around 6 p.m., and Carreño cleans and prepares her home for the next day’s rush.
As the coronavirus took hold, schools closed and many have not reopened this fall. But many parents of young children cannot work from home. So they have left their children with Carreño, and thousands of other child care providers across the country. Now, Carreño must hope that her home’s Wi-Fi can handle ten or more users, and that she and her husband—her assistant—can guide children through the distance-learning sessions, in addition to attending to their younger-age kids.
This is the new normal: unionized schoolteachers conducting lessons online from home, and mostly non-union child care workers supervising groups of young learners who can’t stay at home. Each student may have a different schedule, a different lesson plan, and varying levels of computer competence. Each student must also follow strict handwashing protocols, keep six feet apart, and wear a mask; Carreño must supply most of the protective equipment herself. Keeping the mask on toddlers and even school-age children, Carreño says, is an all-encompassing task. She’s not just conducting what amounts to in-person schooling in one classroom, but in several, all at once.
It’s difficult for Carreño and providers like her. “I’ll be very honest, it’s hard for me, but I have to give it a big old smile so my kids think everything is OK, even though I hate it,” said Ayde Jaime about managing her home child care business in Kern County, California, during the pandemic.
Child care providers, similar to other caregiving workers, toil in one of the fastest-growing and lowest-paid professions in the economy. Nearly all child care workers are women, and roughly half of them are Black, Latino, or Asian. Many are undocumented. Few workers have benefits and, according to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), “close to half of child care workers live in families assisted by one or more public support programs.”
Paradoxically, despite workers earning barely enough to make ends meet, early-childhood education is often too costly for parents. This leads to many women, unfairly burdened with caregiving responsibilities, opting to leave their jobs to raise their children, adversely affecting their long-term earning potential. Some women also choose to become early-childhood educators, joining a center or turning their own homes into early-learning environments. But those who do struggle to support their own families. Child care providers made a median wage of just $11.65 an hour in 2019, a number that has hardly budged in years.
While there’s a lot of demand for child care, there’s little government support for the workers and children for whom they care. The coronavirus has exposed and exacerbated the problem, but workers are seeking real change through organizing.
IN CALIFORNIA, CHILD CARE providers recently pulled off a major organizing victory. Roughly 43,000 home-based child care workers, most of them women of color, won acceptance of a new union called California Child Care Providers United. A whopping 97 percent voted to join the union, for workers who care for children from poor and working-class families that get state subsidies for child care. They will now bargain directly with the state over pay and work conditions.
The victory, making California the 12th and largest state to enable child care workers to organize, was the culmination of a 17-year effort. Family care and other domestic workers were excluded from collective bargaining in the National Labor Relations Act—largely because the workers were and are disproportionately Black women. But states have the ability to grant those rights. In 2003, workers demanded that California pass legislation authorizing a union, but Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger’s victory dashed those hopes.
Legislation finally advanced last fall, and organizers kicked into campaign mode. Before the pandemic, providers went door to door, asking each other for support. Afterward, they had to get more creative, with calling, emailing, texting, and Facebook groups. Valeska Sanchez-Reyes, who worked in Kern County, where many providers are close to the farmworkers’ union victory of the 1960s, started in 2014 with just a few dozen providers, and ended the county’s campaign with between 400 and 500 providers in the union.
Paradoxically, despite workers earning barely enough to make ends meet, early-childhood education is often too costly for parents.
Jono Shaffer, an organizer with SEIU, one of two unions that backed the campaign in California (along with AFSCME), said that “captains” were responsible for staying in touch with lists of providers and helping them cast ballots. Some captains hand-delivered the ballots. Another provider, a Somali immigrant in San Diego, operated a table with a ballot box every day in the main Somali market to reach her community, and collected over 200 ballots.
Both Carreño and Jaime worked on the campaign, helping to organize a dispersed workforce with no traditional “watercooler” or gathering place. Jaime told the Prospect that when SEIU organizer Valeska Sanchez-Reyes first approached her about organizing providers she was dubious, but willing to give it a chance. Now, with a union victory under her belt, she has become a trusted resource for other providers—ensuring that they always have children in their care, helping them apply for loans during the pandemic, and advising on other best practices.
Zoila Toma, a provider from Signal Hill, California, said that the pandemic’s exposure of a broken system helped motivate providers in the last months before the vote. “I think all the providers were kind of feeling more empowered to do it.”
THERE HAVE BEEN other campaigns, too. In 2015, child care providers in Cincinnati joined forces with city organizers and pushed for a universal pre-K initiative to deliver more services to targeted communities, as well as bolster the fortunes of family care businesses and their workers. Called the AMOS project, it began as “a more corporate-led initiative that wasn’t thinking about racial equity and building power” in one of the nation’s most residentially segregated cities, said Prentiss Haney, co-executive director of Ohio Organizing Collaborative. At the time, Haney was an organizer with the Ohio Student Association, and he helped assemble a community-based team of local providers and organizers to work on the initiative. The group coordinated grassroots Black and white evangelical support for the new tax to fund universal pre-K, and coupled the work with registering 40,000 people to vote.
“It changed the conversation around preschool in the state,” Haney said, adding that they pushed through a sister initiative in Dayton, Ohio. While there is still plenty of work to be done, he acknowledged, the organizing helped to create an avenue for workers to push for higher wages.
Wendoly Marte, director of economic justice for Community Change Action, which coordinates and guides local organizing in low-income communities, said that her group began to work on child care and early-childhood education issues more than six years ago. They wanted to look at the broader care economy, and within that, to focus on a national campaign that would lift up low-income people of color and women. In doing that, they partnered with advocates around the country: OLÉ in New Mexico, Parent Voices Oakland, and SPACES in Action in Washington, D.C.
“It’s a space that had been very much driven by a broader advocacy community that was very middle- and upper-class,” Marte said. That advocacy focused primarily on parents rather than on workers. As a result, efforts often focused on professionalization and credentialing, rather than raising wages for workers who have been historically undervalued. Despite early-childhood education being a kitchen-table issue that impacts families nationwide, it’s tackled individually, with no standard pay or workplace protections for workers. “We need a public kind of response to this public crisis,” Marte said.
Community Change first started with 15 partner groups in 13 states, assessing whether to attack the issue through local revenue fights, state subsidies, federal legislation, or something else entirely. The AMOS fight was one of their victories. The effort in Oakland in 2018 won major investments in child care subsidies. In New Mexico, OLÉ helped secure hazard pay for child care workers during the pandemic, setting a precedent.
SPACES in Action rallied in July after learning that D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was planning to cut $5 million from the child care subsidy program. They were able to reverse the cuts, while also adding $5 million for emergency funding for child development centers and $1.4 million to help with new costs for protection from COVID-19. Advocates argue that providers represent essential building blocks to economic growth. “Child care providers work so that other people can work, and that’s not recognized,” said LaDon Love, executive director of SPACES in Action. But pandemic-related revenue shortfalls have paralyzed cities’ and states’ willingness to meaningfully improve conditions for care workers.
There are more than 13 million children eligible to receive child care subsidies, but just 1 in 6 got a subsidy in 2013.
FUNDING STREAMS FOR care providers have always been inadequate. In one analysis by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at Berkeley, at a 40-child center where parents pay an average of $10,000 per year, just 65 percent of the budget goes to personnel, stretched over the salaries of ten people. This is an intrinsic challenge of the work. One provider can only safely care for four infants, and for slightly older children, the ratios are still extremely low—making the cost of safe, quality early education expensive by its very nature.
Current federal subsidies also don’t fund enough children. There are more than 13 million children eligible to receive child care subsidies, but just 1 in 6 got a subsidy in 2013 (the latest year for which data are available), according to the NWLC. Those subsidies directly affect how much providers are paid, either in a center or an in-home operation.
This crisis extends to in-home elder care as well, where workers are similarly underpaid and marginalized. Hundreds of thousands of these home care workers, paid through patients’ Medicaid coverage, lost the ability to have unions deduct their dues from Medicaid-funded wages in 2019, thanks to a rule from President Trump’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. States like Michigan have also instituted this prohibition, so even if a future president reverses the rule, some home elder care workers will be blocked from unionization.
Critically, this is not a full portrait of the care workforce. Thousands of workers also provide informal care in their homes and to family and friends—known as family, friend, and neighbor care (FFN). Few state or local governments offer any sort of compensation for this work. A 2013 Economic Policy Institute paper concluded that median wages for these workers, worked out in private transactions with parents or guardians, is just $7.53 an hour.
For an industry on shaky ground before the virus hit, the aftermath has been horrific. “Instead of child care deserts, we have fossils now,” says Gladys Jones, a provider and organizer in New York City. “There’s people closing every day.” Since February, 1 in 5 child care jobs have been lost. Meanwhile, undocumented workers—center- or home-based—face even more difficult hurdles during the pandemic, because their status makes them ineligible for unemployment insurance, PPP loans, or other state-based aid. Immigrants without an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number—the tax ID for nonresidents and their families—as well as those who lived in a family without an ITIN were also barred from stimulus money.
Karina, an undocumented provider in New Mexico, said that she is the only early-childhood educator in the center where she works who is willing to speak up about working conditions. She worries that if she uses her full name to advocate, her job will be in jeopardy, she told the Prospect through a translator. Other providers at the same center, she said, agree with her but fear speaking out. Karina said one provider left in protest of the low wages after asking for a raise. But for Karina, leaving is not an option. She needs the job, despite the low wages.
The center, Karina says, is struggling to give children of varied ages the instruction they would receive in a classroom. But low-income parents who must continue to work outside the home, she said, have no other options. (That includes Karina’s own children, who accompany her to the center because their school is closed.) Karina said she feels inspired by hearing other providers speak up. “It’s frustrating and scary, but you have to do it,” she said of demanding fair wages and benefits.
Jones expressed frustration that during the pandemic, unionized teachers are working 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. from home and early-childhood educators are working with children from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a lot less money. “That’s the type of injustices,” she continued, and it’s disproportionately Black, Latino, and Asian women providers, but disproportionately white teachers. Politicians, especially the men, she said, don’t think or talk about child care, despite calling broadly for public-school support during the pandemic.
Child care workers, early educators, and in-home support for the elderly perform work that cannot be outsourced or automated. When essential workers go to their jobs—as grocery clerks, bus operators, nurses—they can’t leave anyone behind who cannot fend for themselves. The workforce necessary to care for people is growing. Organizing can give this work the value it deserves, and ensure these workers are treated with dignity and respect. Workers across the country are demanding that the next administration invest in the care economy, and by association, invest in the children and elderly individuals for whom they care.
“Before I die, I would like to see this industry be recognized and respected as a business,” Jones said. “What should happen is that our industry should be like electricity, a utility, that society has evolved, and we cannot do without electricity or light and so that’s the same way child care should be looked at.”
