information for practice

For decades, child care advocates, provider associations, and others in the field have worked together for increased public investment in child care, in order to improve the quality of child care and make it more affordable. This work has included efforts to improve the pay and working conditions of child care providers, including by securing more funding for child care assistance to help families pay for care, developing and encouraging greater education and training opportunities for providers, fighting for “a worthy wage” and benefits for the child care workforce, and giving child care providers an additional voice on policy and regulatory issues. Unions have been an important voice in the effort to increase public investment in child care and they share with the broader child care advocacy community a concern for improving the lot of child care providers. But unions have also begun to play a role in state campaigns for increased public investment in child care that is more akin to their traditional role: worker representative. Unionization of the child care workforce is not a new phenomenon. A small percentage of child care centers and Head Start programs have been unionized for decades.