April 20, 2006

By AMY ROE
Contributing Writer

When a labor organizer came knocking on the front door of Shawn Harris’s Tacoma home late last year, she was skeptical. Harris, a former Head Start teacher who runs a licensed home-based child-care center, had no experience with unions. It was only because she knew the canvasser from high school that she even bothered to open the door.

“ She talked to me about the union and I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah,” Harris says.

Harris went to a meeting anyway and was shocked to learn that many as 10,000 others were also offering licensed home-based child care in Washington state.

“ I had no idea,” she says.

For years the state’s family child-care providers, many of them women working out of their own homes, have been an invisible industry.

Although home-based child care represents 30 percent of the licensec child-care market in Washington state, providers have no collecitive bargaining unit and only a few small child-care associations.

“ We had no way of gathering together, no forum,” says Harris. “Everybody, each day care, is to themselves.”

That’s about to change.

Last month Governor Christine Gregoire signed into law a bill that allows the state’s family child-care workers to unionize. House Bill 2353 makes Washington the second state, after Illinois, to permit such unions. The law covers all child care providers who take subsidies for working-poor parents. Eligibility for the subsidy is determined by household income, family size, and county of residence and is priced on a sliding-scale fee.

Family child care providers are in the process of electing representatives to a bargaining committee in anticipation of a vote to be held next month by the state’s Public Employees Relations Commission.

A “yes” vote in that election would make it official, but family child care workers have already turned out in favor of unions. In a November 2005 election conducted by the American Arbitration Association, 92 percent of the child-care providers voted to join the collective bargaining unit.

Among the first issues child-care workers hope to address is the subsidy the state pays for child care to the working poor, which ranges betwen $16 and $30 for a full day of care, depending on the age of the child.

Almost half of all state-subsidized child care is provided by family-based child-care providers, and in rural areas, where fewer child-care options exist, that number is even higher. In Washington state, 43 percent of all children in licensed child care in rural areas are in home-based care, compared to 24 percent of children in metropolitan areas.

Of the 12 families that Shawn Harris serves, just two pay the full fee for day care. The other 10 receive state subsidies. It can take six weeks to receive the payments from the state, and when you factor in overhead, the rate she receives — $22.73 per day for an infant — doesn’t cover the real cost of child care, Harris says.

The state subsidy varies from county to county, but Harris believes that’s not fair, since many costs, such as food and supplies, are the same price in Pierce and King County.

Even in King County, where the rate is the highest, the subsidy had failed to keep up with the cost of living, says Kathy Yasi, who runs a licensed day care out of her Central District home.

“ People spend more money to have their dog in day care than the state pays to have subsidized day care,” she says.

In King County, the state pays $25.55 per day for a school-age child in family home care. A full day at a Seattle doggy daycare costs about $25.

The state should do more to help home-based child care workers navigate the paperwork needed to receive the subsidy, Harris adds.

“ There’s 52 pages of dos and don’ts,” she says, but for the most part providers learn how to get reimbursed by trial and error. “You kind of learn as you go.”

Whether or not they take the state’s subsidy, family child-care providers are seeking a way to secure their own health insurance.

Most don’t have any, and earn too little to purchase their own. According to a May 2004 report by the state’s Department of Social and Health Services, the median hourly wage of a child care work is $8.06. The state’s minimum wage is $7.63.

Unless you’re married to a spouse whose employer carries insurance, “a lot of us are just without,” Harris says.

The push to unionize home-based child-care workers echoes previous efforts to organize another sector of the work force, home health-care workers, many of whom are paid in part by the state for taking care of elderly or disabled clients.

In both cases workers are indirectly employed by the state, noted SEIU 925 spokeswoman Gretchen Donart, and their compensation should reflect the true value of the services they provide, not just to families, but to society.

That hasn’t happened, Yasi believes, because many home-based child-care centers are invisible businesses, out of sight and out of mind.

“ I think the problem is that we’re perceived to be a little bit renegade,” she says, “because we’re off on our own somewhere.”

With a union to bring them together, both women are confident that in-home child-care workers’ voices will be heard.

As Harris puts it, “When you have 10,000 people saying the same message, they tend to take notice.” n