ShareVoice of the Chapter Chair: Sept. 2011
Tammie Miller
I’m glad to report that our chapter continues to grow and to advance the struggle for dignity for New York City’s 28,000 family child care providers.
We have had many victories since our founding in 2005, most importantly winning for providers our first-ever contract with the state, ratified in January 2010. We made history then — and we continue to make it now.
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 working to improve the working conditions of providers. We have won precedent-setting agreements that prevented the closure of providers’ homes throughout the city by the Department of Buildings, forcing it to obey state law. We have advocated extending the life of providers’ licenses by requiring renewal every four years instead of every two.
In the last six years, we have recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages for individual providers, the result of late, missing and inaccurate paychecks or the ACS's failure 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’ve now distributed to more than 4,000 licensed and registered providers, have also been a huge success. We’re so confident that you and the children in your care will benefit from these educational toys that we are hand-delivering them to providers who, for reasons of health or lack of access to a car or coverage in their program, have been unable to come to our offices to pick them up. You can read more about the kits on page 4 of this newspaper. If you haven’t yet made arrangements to get your kit, I encourage you to do so soon!
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, you can 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 dues-paying 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 will receive more information about automatic dues deduction soon. Meanwhile, 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