Child-Care Workers Look to Unions

The living room teems with toys and picture books. Six small children are snacking around a tot-sized table. Yet Norma Tetrault’s home, as much as any union hall or picket line, represents a pivotal front for America’s embattled labor movement.

Women like Tetrault, working from home, have become foot soldiers in a difficult but potentially momentous nationwide campaign to unionize hundreds of thousands of low-paid child-care workers.

Unprecedented breakthroughs have come recently in Illinois and a few other states, but in Rhode Island -- despite a strong union legacy -- there were painful setbacks last year. Tetrault, echoing the resolve of union leaders nationwide, vows to persevere.

“We’re in this for the long haul,” she says, standing with feet in two rooms so she can grant an interview and still keep watch on her charges. “Every time you take five steps forward, you take 10 steps back. But I’m not quitting.”

Child-care providers are among the lowest paid of U.S. workers, often earning less than $10 an hour. A recent federal survey listed only 18 other types of jobs, out of 770, that paid less.

The low pay, lack of health insurance and other benefits, and a sense of being disrespected has produced a legion of workers open to unionization as the most viable strategy for gaining clout. And their interest is reciprocated: Faced with declining overall membership, major unions see child-care providers as a vital source of potential growth and are competing to represent them.

“This is a very untraditional area in terms of organizing,” said Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the 1.8-million-member Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, which is at the forefront of efforts to represent the providers.

“It’s mostly women, working in their own homes,” Burger said. “The fact that they’re wanting to come together and have a collective voice is remarkable. It shows their determination and creativity.”

Reliable statistics are elusive when it comes to child-care employment, partly because of high turnover, partly because many providers are unlicensed and care for just a few children. The Center for the Child Care Workforce estimates there are about 550,000 people employed by child-care centers and another 650,000 home-based providers nationwide; the portion of them who are unionized recently has surged past 10%.

The biggest breakthrough came in Illinois, where SEIU last year won the right to represent 49,000 in-home providers serving children whose fees are covered by state and federal funds. In December, after Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich ordered the state to negotiate, SEIU obtained a $250-million, 39-month contract that would raise providers’ daily rates an average of 35% and eventually bring them health coverage.

It was the first such statewide contract. Even at a time when many states are trying to cut costs and meet rising healthcare bills, it sparked hopes among union leaders of similar gains elsewhere.

In Washington state, about 10,000 in-home providers voted last year to join SEIU. They hope to gain collective-bargaining rights this year.

Last fall, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski directed state agencies to open talks with child-care providers represented by SEIU’s main rival, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. This year, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack ordered talks with representatives of his state’s 13,000 in-home providers, whose earnings average less than $15,000 a year.

While SEIU and AFSCME are competing to represent the Iowa workers, the two giant unions have agreed to form a unified child-care organization in California and Pennsylvania. Organizing also has been vigorous in Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

Though unionized workers at child-care centers in Connecticut and New York City have staged strikes in the past two years, AFSCME organizer Denise Dowell says union leaders view the industry as very different from those that routinely produce labor-management conflict.

“It’s not a question of going to an employer and saying we want better pay -- parents are paying what they can,” Dowell said. “This is about building a movement that’s going to change the flow of public resources, so standards are raised and more kids have access to quality early education.”

Fred Brooks, a social work professor at Georgia State University, said the providers would be wise to get parents on their side.

“It’s an easy argument to make: that what’s good for the worker is good for the child,” he said. “The unions have to get out there and make that argument.”

Thus far, the unionization drive has made little headway in the South, the Great Plains or the Rocky Mountain states, and last year’s setbacks in Rhode Island illustrated that obstacles can arise even in a traditionally union-friendly state.

First, Republican Gov. Don Carcieri vetoed a bill that would have allowed 1,300 home-based providers who care for state-subsidized children to negotiate with the state over pay, working conditions and training incentives. Carcieri called the bill a “travesty” that would be too costly for taxpayers; lawmakers didn’t try to override the veto.

Then, in November, a judge ruled that home day-care providers such as Norma Tetrault -- although they receive much of their income from the state -- were not state employees and thus not entitled to bargain collectively. The judge, in another victory for Carcieri, overturned a 2004 decision by Rhode Island’s Labor Relations Board.

Carcieri was joined in opposing unionization by the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, which also was concerned about costs, and the state’s largest newspaper, the Providence Journal, referred to providers as “baby-sitters” in an editorial.

“They look at us as a whole bunch of uneducated women who just want more money,” said Rosemary Raygada, 38, who runs a small child-care operation out of her Providence home. An immigrant from Peru, Raygada said that a majority of the providers who forged links with SEIU are Latino, black and Asian.

“If it was mostly white women, they’d get their way,” said Raygada, who doesn’t buy the argument that unionized child-care workers would stress the state budget.

Raygada and Tetrault, like many providers, say they need and deserve higher pay but insist the union drive is more about respect than money. They want the state to speed up payments, improve benefits and confer on ways to make state regulations more efficient.

“People don’t look at us as professionals,” Tetrault said. “Our job is viewed as something we just fell into. Well, I didn’t fall into it. This is a calling. You do it because you love it.”

Tetrault, 49, was a Head Start teacher for 11 years before shifting 10 years ago to become a self-employed child-care provider at her modest wood-frame home in Pawtucket.

She said she rises at 5 a.m. each weekday and, with help from her husband, cares for five to eight children from 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.

It can get hectic -- she recalled an afternoon when one child was vomiting, another had diarrhea, two were fighting over a toy, and the telephone kept ringing.

“We’re maybe a little crazy to take on this job,” she said. “But I fall in love every day. The day I stop laughing at the things they do, I need to quit.”