Quality Child Care: The Union Solution

Quality child care means better jobs and better-educated children.

Thaddeus Cook Sr. may be one of the luckiest parents in the United States. With millions of hard-working Americans scrambling for quality, affordable child care, the New York City custodian has found a dream arrangement: 3-year-old son Thaddeus Jr. attends day care for free at his father’s workplace, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Early Childhood Development Center.

"I can go about my day without worrying about his safety because he is being cared for by my union brothers and sisters," says the Local 95 (D.C. 1707) member. Cook has worked at the federally subsidized Head Start site for the past seven years.

Child care has become a significant issue for AFSCME and other unions as more and more Americans are dropping their children off every morning at day care facilities across the nation. An estimated 250,000 AFSCME members have children under the age of 6.

AFSCME is promoting the best possible care for America’s children by bargaining for child care provisions in contracts and by winning decent wages, benefits and working conditions for child care workers. By putting more resources into child care today, America will have better-educated adults in the future.

Despite the desperate need for quality services, child care providers are among the most underpaid, underappreciated workers in the country. New York D.C. 1707 Exec. Director Josephine LeBeau complains that the salaries of child care workers remain shamefully low. "Many of our child care workers put in long hours delivering quality care and have the same credentials as Board of Education public school teachers, but our workers don’t get the same pay," she says.

LeBeau and other AFSCME leaders are helping unionized workers to get the pay they deserve and organizing non-union facilities throughout the country. AFSCME currently represents some 13,000 child care, Head Start and before- and after-school care workers.

CRYING NEED. If you think that today’s parents are obsessed with finding child care, you’re not mistaken. They have to be. The Children’s Defense Fund estimates there are 13 million preschoolers — including 6 million infants and toddlers — in child care every day. That adds up to three out of five young children. At the same time, millions of school-age children are in after-school and summer activities; nearly 5 million children are left alone while their parents work.

Study after study has rated child care in the United States poor to mediocre. One investigation found that fully 40 percent of care centers provided such poor care that the children’s health, development and safety were in jeopardy. A Carnegie Corporation report found that children in poor quality child care were delayed in language and reading skills, and often display more aggression.

UNAFFORDABLE. Quality child care is expensive. And for most Americans, it is not affordable. Full-day child care costs between $4,000 and $10,000 per year — as much as college tuition at a public university. One-half of American families with young children earn less than $35,000 a year. A family with both parents working full time at minimum wage earns only $21,400 a year. And, even though some subsidies are available for low-income families, funds are severely limited with only one in 10 eligible children getting the help they need, according to the Children’s Defense Fund.

TWO SOLUTIONS. Take the case of AFSCME Local 3976 (Council 26) member Chris Durbin, an agricultural marketing specialist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. She and her husband Marty found adopting their son Alexander two years ago easy compared to finding quality child care.

"When we got the word to bring 3-week-old Alex home, I had virtually one week to find child care. And it was tough," says Durbin, who contacted the state of Maryland for a listing of accredited providers. "Very few centers would take infants, but we finally found a high-quality program for our son."

The Circle Time Day Care in Wheaton, Md., is located in a private home where eight staffers work in shifts to cover 12½ hours each day. Durbin pays a steep $195 per week, but says it is worth it because her son is Hispanic and there are bilingual instructors in the program. "He gets one-on-one education, and that is very important to us," she says.

In Palestine, Texas, Heith and Amanda Stampley have found a different solution to their child care problems.

When Heith is at work at the George Beto Correctional Facility and Amanda is at college finishing her degree, their friend Lisa Knoch watches the couple’s children in return for free rent in the Stampleys’ home.

"Lisa is a godsend," says Heith, a correctional officer and member of Local 3806 (Council 7). "We call our child care arrangement ‘one for the 90s’ with every adult in the household pitching in to care for all the kids." It’s quite a brood: four Stampley children ages 2½ to 9 as well as Knoch’s 2-year-old daughter.

"We really did not have anyone else to turn to except Lisa," says Amanda. "Even if we had the money — which we don’t — the cost of quality care would run us around $1,200 a month. It’s a win-win situation for now. She’s been with us since her divorce, and we pray she won’t move on any time soon."

AFSCME’S ANSWER. For more than 10 years, AFSCME has advocated accessible, affordable, quality child care for working Americans and on behalf of its members. Child care has been an issue at the bargaining table, and the union has been successful in negotiating child care programs in collective bargaining agreements.

In a study of 104 major AFSCME contracts, 74 provided some type of child care assistance. Of these, 84 percent enabled workers to use sick leave to care for sick children; 54 percent have dependent care assistance plans; 33 percent have on-site child care centers; 27 percent have resource and referral serv-ices; 18 percent include financial assistance; 15 percent have after-school care programs; and 6 percent have sick or emergency child care.

QUALITY JOBS=QUALITY CARE. While the union has fought to raise wages for its child care workers, compensation still does not reflect their true worth.

A wage report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that a worker who helps bury people is paid a dollar more per hour than workers who help to raise children. A funeral attendant earns $7.16 an hour while the median wage for a child care worker is $6.17 an hour. By the same token, a pest control worker earns $10.25 an hour — $4 more to kill bugs than to care for children who are this country’s future.

In addition, only one-third of all child care teachers — workers who have primary responsibility for children — receive health benefits, and many are not paid for holidays, sick leave or vacations. Higher quality centers pay higher wages and provide better benefits for teachers.

Studies have shown that children must have consistency in their daily life. In programs where there is high teacher turnover, children suffer. Many centers lose more than half of their staff each year. Centers paying the lowest wages lose the greatest number of teachers.

Marcy Whitebook, co-director of the Center for the Child Care Workforce, a national group dedicated to improving the compensation and working conditions of child care workers, says it best: "Parents can’t afford to pay. Teachers can’t afford to stay. There’s got to be a better way."

AFSCME believes the better way is to organize child care workers and negotiate for better teacher and provider compensation and training opportunities. Unionization fosters a stable, profes-sional workforce.

BOTH SIDES NOW. Glynnise Collins has worked in union and non-union day care facilities. For the past two years she has worked at Springhill Lake Elementary School in Greenbelt, Md. A member of AFSCME Maryland Local 2250, she prefers to work in a unionized environment.

Collins recently attended a child care training seminar sponsored by AFSCME’s Women’s Rights Department. "Education training is just one of the benefits I enjoy, now that I am a member of AFSCME," says Collins who now earns $4 an hour more than she did in a privately run child care center. "By joining the union, I have increased health and retirement benefits as well as additional vacation, sick leave and the use of a sick leave bank. With the extra money I’m earning, I can afford to splurge every now and then on new clothes to wear to work."

ORGANIZING JOBS. AFSCME International Vice Pres. Henry Nicholas, president of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees/1199, hosted a founding convention to establish and organize a professional child care employee association in Philadelphia earlier this month. Nicholas said there is nothing menial about the work child care providers do, except their wages.

A BLS report showed that male workers in the United States are paid an average of $33,971 annually — almost three times more than child care staff. Female workers make an average of 50 percent more than child care teaching staff.

"While proposals are being developed to put more money into the child care system, few policymakers are talking about raising wages and benefits of child care workers even though we know that the quality of care is directly linked to the quality of jobs in the field," says Nicholas. "We deserve to be fairly compensated for our work."

New York’s Josephine LeBeau adds that "upgrading our workers’ wages will ensure that recipients of unionized child care will continue to get the outstanding care that puts them at the top of their grade school classes."

AFSCME D.C. 37 and D.C. 1707 — representing 140,000 members in New York City — have joined forces with a city coalition in lobbying the state legislature to increase child care funding by $200 million. The unions also will demand that their employers contribute to a multi-union child care fund, believed to be the first in the nation. The coalition’s goal is for the state to subsidize 50,000 more child care slots, build more day care centers and provide better child care training for workers.

THE CLINTON CONNECTION. In an effort to resolve the nation’s child care woes, the Clinton Administration held the first-ever White House Conference on Child Care last year to discuss strategies for the system’s three key challenges: availability, affordability, and assuring safety and quality.

This year President Clinton announced that his fiscal 1999 budget would include approximately $20 billion over five years for child care, with $15 billion going toward Health and Human Services child care programs and Head Start. If passed, the historic initiative would help working families pay for child care, build up the supply of good after-school programs, improve the safety and quality of care, promote early learning, and expand child care tax credits for middle-class families. It also would expand block grants to the states for poor kids, provide credits for business, and give some incentive money for training new workers.

A 1996 survey of AFSCME members revealed that 72 percent favor greater federal support for child care. "The union’s direct experiences have reinforced our belief that the nation’s child care problems are too great to be solved at the bargaining table alone," says International Pres. Gerald W. McEntee. "National action is urgently needed to make child care more affordable, accessible and to improve quality of care through increased training linked to compensation, higher compensation for already trained and educated workers and national standards. The federal government must lead the way in improving child care by making a major investment in improving quality, accessibility and affordability."

By Venida RaMar Marshall

Searching for Child Care? AFSCME Can Help

No matter where you live, finding quality child care is difficult. AFSCME’s Women’s Rights Department has produced a brochure, "Choosing Quality Child Care," to help make the search a little easier. Here are some key points to remember:

• Allow at least two months to search for child care. If you need care for an infant or for a child with special needs, you may want to start your search even earlier.
• Call you local child care resource and referral agency for a list of licensed child care providers in your area and ask for the state’s licensing and registration requirements for care providers. Also ask about recent inspections, licensing violations and complaints.
• Call Child Care Aware toll free (1-800-424-2246) if you have trouble locating child care resources.
• Check with your union. Some have bargained for customized child care resource and referral services for union members at no charge. These programs provide one-on-one interviews with parents and find vacant spaces to match their needs.
• Check with friends who have young children for the name of a center or provider that they strongly recommend.
• Once you have a list of potential providers, it is useful to screen them by phone so you can narrow down your choices.
• Visit the centers or family child care providers that you have determined to have met your initial requirements. Make visits during operating hours so you can observe the classrooms, teachers and children.
• Child care providers should be: warm and caring; attentive and responsive; committed to being a provider; inquisitive about children; creative in planning activities; able to call on a support system for routine information and in emergency situations; able to follow standard business practices; and licensed and regulated.

Contact AFSCME’s Women’s Rights Department for a copy of "Choosing Quality Child Care" at 1625 L St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036-5687 or (202) 429- 5090. The booklet is also available on the AFSCME Web site.