Editor's note: This story kicks off this week's Early Childhood newsletter, featuring trends and top stories about early learning. This newsletter is delivered free to subscribers' inboxes every other Wednesday.
The pandemic has highlighted the stark differences in pay, working conditions, and respect between K-12 educators and child care workers in many communities. These disparities are rooted in race, class, and gender. Child care teachers are more likely to be female, less likely to be white, and more likely to come from low-income backgrounds than public school teachers.
Despite historically poor treatment and low wages, child care workers have found it unusually difficult to unionize due to high turnover rates, geographic dispersion and isolation of the workforce, labor laws, and other factors.
But there have been some union victories in recent years. In California, Child Care Providers United, which represents more than 40,000 in-home child care providers, won collective bargaining rights in 2019 and last year secured the second significant reimbursement increase from the state for many in-home child care providers. In New Mexico, where it is more difficult for workers to unionize, organizers took a different approach. Through the leadership of an organization called OLÉ, parents and caregivers joined forces to organize a public awareness campaign that helped voters approve the constitutional amendment. In most states, families have the right to free child care.
Earlier this month, I spoke with Alexa Frankenberg, Executive Director of California's Child Care Providers United, and Brenda Parra, Senior Digital Strategist at OLÉ, about how to effectively organize child care workers and the importance of different strategies for doing so. I did. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you tell us about your personal background and how you got involved in this field?
blue: It's probably been about 6 or 7 years. I previously worked as a childcare teacher. I was in a classroom with 3 year olds and unfortunately had to leave. I really loved this job, but the pay was very low and I could no longer support my family. Someone told me about Ole, who was working as a childcare organizer at the time. So I started participating in these groups. And I stayed there for a while before I decided to become an organizer.
What have you learned about how to create organization effectively in your childcare space?
Frankenberg: One of the things that makes this uniquely difficult is how dispersed family child care providers are. They obviously work from their own homes, so there are tens of thousands of workplaces across the state for members represented by Child Care Providers United (CCPU). That means you have to figure out how to talk to people. [many] A workplace setting about how organizing together to build power through unions can make a difference in their lives.
Another problem is related to low wages. Many child care providers and employees must work multiple jobs to make a living and support their families. So finding the time to have conversations, do organizational work, and work together to make change can be a challenge. It takes time.
Thinking about your success in California, what were the specific strategies you used there to overcome these challenges?
blue: There is work that can be done in terms of systematically identifying and recruiting leaders and equipping them to do the job. You will never have the resources to run a campaign that visits 50,000 job sites to talk to people. This requires early thinking about individuals leading and owning this work, including conversations with colleagues.
What was Olleh’s strategy when he first started his career?
blue: From what I understand, Ole started knocking on doors, and the organizers went to the center, spoke to the director, and asked if they could talk to the teachers or parents.
How has your strategy evolved over time?
blue: Digital work has increased during COVID-19.
Because of the COVID situation and everyone being sick, it has been very difficult to find child care. Many centers were also closed. We were running ads on social media. We were able to get more information and provide more information to people. When we started organizing online, we were able to complete in one day what would have taken a week to visit the centre.
Thinking of New Mexico, Olle's How important is it for child care teachers to think of other strategies separate from traditional organizing if they are to be successful in expanding outside of their unions?
Frankenberg: I don't think it has to be one or the other. We have been working with partners like parent advocates and other organizations here in California. And this has been the driving force behind our success, not only at the state level, but also at the local level. We worked very closely with Parent Voices of Alameda County to get passage of local legislation to fund additional child care space, higher wages, and other needed supports. We continue to look at what New Mexico has done to transition to alternative methods. We certainly think there are very important and important guarantees that suppliers can have through union contracts, but organizing and collective power takes many different forms.
How were we able to translate online organizing in New Mexico into concrete wins for childcare workers?
blue: My job is to place online ads and collect respondents' phone numbers and names. After that, one of the early education campaign organizers will text you or put you in a phone bank or text bank for more information.
Has the pandemic made organizing your childcare space easier or more difficult?
Frankenberg: This is a difficult question to answer because there is nothing easy about infectious diseases. What these individuals have gone through financially, physically, mentally, and emotionally is all still being felt. So it would be really hard to say that things have gotten easier. What it did was make the results very stark. It was very clear that work needed to be done to ensure the basic health and safety of individuals. We've had to fight for Covid closure days so we don't have to close and lose money because people have Covid or someone in the nursery has Covid.
The pandemic has shined a spotlight on the value of child care in helping people who need to go to work get there during those first few months, especially when schools are closed. Childcare teachers have supported our economy for a long time. And they never really got a break.
What do you think the future holds for child care organizations?
Frankenberg: We are in the process of transitioning to reimbursement for care, something we have achieved in New Mexico. That would be a big thing for us. There are many short-term gains we could have made through salaries. And it's important that we actually move toward the system, not just keep going short, short, short. I am pleased to partner with the Governor on this. And we're working to make sure people get more than one cent on the dollar.
We need to make sure that the child care system we have is one that actually reflects what California will look like in 2024, rather than one that was established 50 years ago and may have such biases. We must eradicate the racism and sexism inherent in the system. It's built into wages and compensation, but it also applies to truly unjust policies that negatively impact families and providers.
This story about child care advocacy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent journalism organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Subscribe to the Hechinger newsletter.