Voice of the Chapter Chair: Dec. 2011

Tammie Miller The coming year will be a great one for New York City’s 28,000 family child care providers. After years of waiting, the benefits in our contract that have not yet been implemented will go into effect over the next nine months. Chief among these is our health care coverage, which you can read about here.

We will also receive millions of dollars from the state to use for trainings and “quality improvement grants” to help providers improve their child care programs. All told, the total package of benefits we will receive this year — including health care and money for trainings and grants — is worth more than $10 million.

But these are only the most recent in a long list of victories that our chapter has won for providers since our founding in 2005. Until now, the most important of these was winning — and ratifying — our first-ever contract with the state.

Here are other victories:

• Each year, we fight for adequate child care funding for working parents and their children. Most recently, our activism helped reduce the size of the proposed city cut to child care subsidies from $91 million to $38 million.
• We are constantly seeking to improve the working conditions of providers. We have won precedent-setting agreements that prevented the closure of a number of providers’ programs by the Department of Buildings, forcing the agency to obey state law. We have also advocated extending the life of providers’ licenses by requiring renewal every four years instead of every two.
• We have recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages for individual providers, the result of late, missing and inaccurate paychecks or the failure of ACS to pay providers the correct market rate.
• We now offer a wide variety of trainings and workshops for providers — on everything from CPR and first aid to how to become a licensed provider and expand your business. We’ll soon offer our first class on the dangers of bloodborne disease, a workplace hazard with which anyone working with children should be familiar.
• Our educational kits, which we distributed for free to more than 4,000 licensed and registered providers, were a huge success. We were so confident that you and the children in your care would benefit from these educational toys and supplies that we hand-delivered them to providers who, for reasons of health or lack of access to a car or coverage in their program, were unable to come to our offices to pick them up.

But all of this work requires money. In addition to your participation in rallies and other union activities, the chapter needs one more thing from you: financial support. With automatic dues deduction in place, our young chapter will have the resources it needs to continue to fight on your behalf. And, despite our great accomplishments so far, we still have a lot of fighting to do!

As you continue to care for the children in your program, rest assured that the union is working on your behalf. But we will only win if we stand together. That’s why we need you to stand with us and become a member of the union if you have not yet — so that we can continue to fight together for all providers’ rights and to ensure that there are no additional cuts to child care funding.

If we don’t stand together now, we may have nothing left to fight for later. The future of child care — our livelihood and a critical service for working families in our communities — is at stake.

You can read more about automatic dues deduction on the first page of this newspaper. Please don't hesitate to contact my office with any questions you may have.

In Solidarity,

Tammie Miller
Chapter Chair
UFT Family Child Care Providers