New Mexico - Home Child Care Providers Win Organizing Rights
Winning A Voice | New Mexico child care providers successfully lobbied at the state Capitol for legislation that will allow them to form a union with AFSCME.
Winning A Voice | New Mexico child care providers successfully lobbied at the state Capitol for legislation that will allow them to form a union with AFSCME.
Photo Credit: Council 18
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Nearly 3,000 home child care providers statewide can now form a union, build power and improve the quality of the services they provide, thanks to legislation signed by Gov. Bill Richardson (D).
Council 18, the International Union and a large number of child care providers and other community organizations lobbied aggressively for the bill, which affects both registered and licensed providers who take care of children through the state’s child care assistance program. Richardson signed it in April.
Before the bill became law, New Mexico’s home-based child care providers could not form a union nor meet collectively with state officials to negotiate improvements to their reimbursement rates or to the services that they provide.
“When we started this campaign about three years ago, child care providers had dwindled from 4,000 to about 2,500,” says Council 18 Pres. Andrew Padilla. “That means that 1,500 of them had stopped doing the job. When that happens, there is nobody to care for these children of working class families. This bill will help providers gain more access to training so they can provide a better quality of child care.”
Many providers have already signed cards indicating their desire to form a union with Council 18's affiliate, Child Care Providers Together (CCPT)/New Mexico. Among them is Alicia Román of Doña Ana County, a former member of the governor’s Health Policy Commission. “I believe that we need to unionize in order to be stronger,” she says. “I want to mentor and work with some of my sister providers so we can all act as one and improve family child care.”
With their new organizing rights in hand, the providers are working to collect sufficient signatures on membership cards to conduct a mail ballot election to certify the union. That is expected sometime this summer.
