Ringo Chiu via AP
The state calculates that while just 34 percent of child care centers have stayed open during the pandemic, fully 74 percent of home-based providers have remained up and running, providing services to their disproportionately low-wage families.
In the nation’s largest union organizing victory in many years, California’s Public Employment Relations Board announced Monday that the state’s home-based care workers for children from poor families that receive state child care subsidies had voted to form a union. California Child Care Providers United has 43,000 members, and of those who voted in the union recognition election, fully 97 percent cast their ballot for the CCPU.
The identity of these new members is every bit as notable as their quantity. All but a handful are women, and the vast majority are either African American or Latina. Also notable is the length of their battle for the right to organize, which began all the way back in 2003.
Like millions of workers in minority- and female-dominated occupations, family care workers, along with other domestic workers and agricultural laborers, were pointedly excluded from having collective-bargaining rights under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. States, however, were left free to grant those rights to those workers, as California did for farmworkers during Jerry Brown’s first go-round as governor in the mid-1970s. When child care workers first began to organize 17 years ago, their hope was that their state—first in granting farmworkers that right—would also become the first in granting child care providers that right.
It didn’t work out that way. As Rachel Cohen documented last year in the Prospect, the hope that Democratic Gov. Gray Davis (who’d been Brown’s chief of staff for part of his first gubernatorial term) would sign such legislation was dashed when Davis lost a recall election to Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. When Brown became governor again in 2011, that hope revived, but ran up against the state’s dismal fiscal condition in the wake of the 2008 crash, not to mention Brown’s existential stinginess.
It wasn’t until last fall, then, that the efforts of the providers and the unions backing them—AFSCME and SEIU (the latter being the state’s largest union, with more than 700,000 members in its California locals)—prevailed upon the legislature and Brown’s successor as governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, to pass and sign legislation enabling the providers to unionize. Had such legislation been signed into law in 2003, California would have led the nation; today, it follows 11 other states that have granted such rights in the years since.
Rasiene Reece, who’s been a child care provider in the desert community of Victorville since the turn of the century, first joined the union in 2004, shortly after its initial efforts began. With her fellow providers scattered across thousands of homes and unable to access a list of those providers, Reece recalls, “we were so completely disconnected.” Reece herself had first heard of the organizing efforts when she saw news about a provider demonstration at the state capitol, which prompted her to join.
The main incentive to join, of course, was the low pay and arbitrary work rules that providers routinely encountered. The union’s surveys have found that providers often made as little as $5 to $7 an hour after expenses, and that 58 percent of the workforce made so little they had to rely on state income assistance. Until 2009, Reece says, a state rule that providers were to receive extra pay if they put in more than 52 hours a week not only went unenforced but providers weren’t even made aware of its existence. It was the union that unearthed the rule, after which those payments were made.
Nor was the inadequacy of state funding the only issue; its byzantine distribution was a problem as well. The funding was routed through county governments to agencies that set their own distinct rules, and thence to the children’s parents to pay the providers—which didn’t always happen. Miren Algorri, a provider in Chula Vista, followed in her mother’s footsteps as a provider, and recalls one instance where her mother couldn’t prevail on her county to compel parents who owed her $9,000 to pay her those funds.
Despite the fact that many providers are immigrants, Algorri adds, some “local agencies would shut the doors in our face if we didn’t speak English.” And speaking English hardly led to decent pay. “My mother was a licensed provider,” Algorri says, “but she was paid as an unlicensed provider even after she produced her license.”
Though it still lacked the right to bargain, the CCPU has been able to win better treatment for providers and some increases in state funding for child care subsidies in recent years. In addition, relations between the two international unions that sought to organize child care workers grew significantly closer than they were 17 years ago. AFSCME and SEIU began to coordinate much of their work in the face of Supreme Court rulings aimed at weakening them both, and the CCPU is a joint effort. The union will have its own elected leadership and staff, and will bargain directly with the state. In some of the state’s counties, it will be affiliated with the United Domestic Workers, an AFSCME local; in the other counties, it will be affiliated with one of two SEIU locals. Experienced organizers from both unions worked on the campaign, including Jono Shaffer, who’d spearheaded SEIU’s organizing of Los Angeles janitors in the landmark Justice for Janitors campaign of the 1990s.
A key component of the legislation enacted last fall required the state to provide the CCPU with a list of all home-based family care providers who cared for children from subsidy-eligible families. When the law took effect this January, the CCPU began its full-throttle organizing campaign, only to confront the obstacle of the COVID pandemic two months later. One thing the pandemic demonstrated, however, was how essential the work of CCPU members is to California families and the California economy. A disproportionate share of the parents of the children that CCPU members care for are “essential” workers whose kids, accordingly, need child care. The state calculates that while just 34 percent of child care centers have stayed open during the pandemic, fully 74 percent of home-based providers have remained up and running, providing services to their disproportionately low-wage families.
Though the providers continued their work, organizers could no longer make in-person house calls to sign them up. CCPU members and organizers then took to digital media. “We now have a slew of Facebook groups to discuss our issues,” Reece says. Always a dispersed workforce, she adds, “COVID has actually brought providers closer together.”
While California government’s fiscal prospects glistened when the legislation was signed into law last fall, the CCPU must now formulate its demands and come to the bargaining table at a time when state revenues have fallen off a cliff, and when Republicans in the U.S. Senate appear reluctant to provide the kind of funding states will need during the COVID depression. Nonetheless, SEIU’s Shaffer notes that in bargaining for more funding, the CCPU will be allied with the children’s parents, just as the teachers in the “Red for Ed” strike wave had their pupils’ parents as powerful allies. That said, parents receiving state subsidies for child care tend to be poor and minority, not groups with much political clout historically, even in a blue state like California.
Still, the zeitgeist might just be changing in their favor. Last week, former Vice President Joe Biden released his plan for bolstering the economy’s caring sector, proposing to spend $775 billion in federal funds over the next decade on child and elder care, as well as a host of related services. Should the Democrats sweep in November and Biden’s family care plan be enacted in 2021, it may be that California’s care providers’ 17-year battle may have culminated at a moment when the nation is finally inclined to recognize the value of their work.
