For Immediate Release
Feb 29, 2008 5:35 PM
Having helped New York City’s 28,000 home-based child care providers form a union last fall in the city’s largest labor organizing drive in decades, the UFT, acting as their collective bargaining agent, opened contract talks on Feb. 29 with the state Office of Children and Family Services.
“It’s a privilege for us to represent providers because they share a bond with teachers in helping educate and care for thousands of our city’s children, and child care is important both educationally and economically, and our goals in this round of negotiations are both educational and economic” said UFT President Randi Weingarten.
“We hope to negotiate improvements for the providers that will raise the quality of the profession and help them achieve sorely needed economic gains as well,” Weingarten added. We want to help the providers hone their skills and give the best service possible as they help children make the transition to pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. We do that by giving the providers opportunities for growth through professional development and access to curricula and training. The unionization of providers will result in improved quality of service, which will help give thousands of children who will enter our public school system the head start they need.”
“It took a two-year campaign to establish an economic and political voice for home child care providers, and we’re going to do our best to secure for them the economic dignity, professional opportunities and respect they deeply deserve but currently lack,” she said.
The New York State Employment Relations Board (SERB) tallied secret ballot cards mailed in between September 5 and October 15 by providers who voted 8,382 to 96 to form a union represented by the UFT, which represents the city’s 110,000 public school educators.
The providers are among the lowest-paid workers in the region. A 2006 study showed that the average annual wage for family and group family providers in New York City is $19,933. The federal poverty line for a family of four in 2004 was $18,850. The providers currently have no health benefits, pension plan or paid vacations.
Weingarten said anything the UFT can do to improve services and working conditions for the providers will result in huge, long-term benefits for the children they care for. She cited the Perry Pre-School Study in Michigan, which tracked children from the ages of 3 or 4, when they began pre-school, into their 20s. Study participants showed increased cognitive skills and higher academic achievement, improved graduation rates, more college enrollments and greater rates of employment. That study also estimated a savings of $7 for every dollar invested in early education through reduced special education needs, lower incarceration rates and reduced welfare and unemployment costs.
The American Federation of Teachers, the UFT’s national affiliate, noted that the inclusion of the providers in the AFT is the largest addition of workers unaffiliated with any other union or organization in the AFT’s history.
The UFT and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) already helped the providers by successfully lobbying the city and the state last summer to pay some of them $160,000 in back pay. The UFT’s Teacher Center also sponsored free classes in childhood development, early preparation for literacy and other subjects for about 3,500 providers.
The UFT and ACORN had worked to unionize the providers for about two years in what had been the largest organizing drive in New York City since the UFT became a union in 1960 with 45,000 members.
After counting authorization cards it received from more than 12,000 New York City home day care workers last May, SERB certified that the UFT and ACORN surpassed the margin required for the workers to hold an election to join a union. The cards were filed May 17, less than a week after Governor Eliot Spitzer signed an executive order allowing more than 60,000 providers across the state to organize. Prior to the Governor’s action, the providers could not organize because the state treated them as independent contractors. His executive order effectively made the providers quasi-employees of the state, which permits the UFT to negotiate for them.
Signatures on the authorization cards from 30 percent of the total 28,000 city providers – fewer than 9,000 – were needed to trigger an election. SERB conducted a count of the city providers’ cards between July 12 and July 19 and determined that the margin was surpassed with 8,860 providers voting to hold an election. SERB scheduled the election and the UFT and ACORN embarked on a get-out-the-vote effort involving advertisements in local newspapers, rallies and door-to-door campaigning through the end of August.
A simple majority vote was required for the UFT to become the providers’ collective-bargaining representative. As a result, the UFT now represents the 28,000 providers in New York City. The Civil Service Employees Association represents day care providers in the rest of the state.
New York is the eighth state to let home-based providers unionize. They receive government subsidies to watch, care for and educate children from low-income families in pre-school and after-school settings. They provide meals and snacks, help children with reading, learning colors and numbers, help with homework, direct safe play and change diapers.