May 24, 2007 3:32 PM
The UFT reached a milestone in its campaign to organize the city’s home-based child-care providers when Gov. Eliot Spitzer on May 11 signed an executive order granting the right to unionize to the 52,000 home-based child-care providers in New York State.
Trying to summon the words to express her joy, Bronx provider Melvina Vandross said, “It’s like a hundred birthday parties all at the same time.”
UFT President Randi Weingarten said the executive order would improve both the quality of child care and the lives of the city’s 28,000 home-based child-care providers, who work long hours for low pay and little benefits.
“But it is just the beginning of the providers’ quest to get the respect, recognition — and fair wages — they deserve for the important work they do,” Weingarten said.
The UFT, in partnership with ACORN, got involved in organizing home-based child-care workers because they play an early and pivotal role in a child’s education and because unions, in order to change the direction of the country, must make the commitment to organize new workers.
Already, 15,000 home-based day-care workers in the city have signed cards saying they want the UFT to represent them.
The State Employment Relations Board will call a union representation election — as early as this summer — if it certifies that one-third of the city’s providers have signed authorization cards.
The Civil Service Employees Association, AFSCME’s largest state local, is vying to represent the home-based child-care providers elsewhere in the state.
Gov. Spitzer announced that he had signed the executive order as he spoke about his commitment to immigrant rights, labor rights and educational opportunity for all New Yorkers.
“This is in keeping with our belief that it is important to extend rights to individuals — to extend the opportunity to negotiate, the opportunity to be heard, and the opportunity to complain,” said the governor at a press conference at CUNY’s Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies.
Home-based child-care providers nurture and educate the children of low-income workers whose day care is subsidized by the federal and state governments. The executive order was necessary because they are considered independent contractors by law.
Gov. George Pataki vetoed a unionization measure 11 months ago that had passed overwhelmingly in both houses of the state Legislature.
Spitzer’s executive order explicitly states that the providers are not state employees, but they would have the right to negotiate with the state for higher pay rates, health insurance and other benefits, improved working conditions, and better training.
Family day-care providers in New York City currently earn $19,000 on average, have little or no health coverage, paid vacation or retirement benefits, and must deal with an often unyielding and unresponsive city and state bureaucracy.
“Assuming we win the election, we will work together to fight for the economic fairness that the providers deserve and to help the kids that they serve,” said Weingarten.
The providers were overcome with emotion at the news.
“We made history here,” said Brooklyn provider Tammie Miller. “This is the best thing that could ever happen in New York City.”
Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser warned that the executive order would lead to less affordable child care because the governor did not increase state funding for day care when unionization would increase the cost of providing day care.
“We believe that this could have the unfortunate consequence of counteracting New York City’s innovative plans to reduce poverty and increase access to child care,” Loeser said.
Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for the governor, dismissed those concerns, “especially in light of the financial windfall New York City received in this year’s [state] budget.”
New York becomes the eighth state to grant the right to form a union to home-based providers.
The UFT has been working on this organizing drive for two years under the direction of UFT Vice President Michelle Bodden; Fran Streich, the campaign’s lead organizer; and Amina Rachman, special assistant to the president; and with the help of Jessica Smith of the AFT.