New York: Child Care Workers Unionize
According to the New York Times:
In the largest successful organizing drive in New York City in half a century, 28,000 child care providers will join the city’s teachers’ union as the result of an overwhelmingly pro-union vote, state officials said yesterday.
Officials of the State Employment Relations Board said yesterday that 8,382 home-based child care providers voted to unionize and 96 voted against doing so. The providers mailed in ballots from Sept. 5 to last Thursday.
Under state rules, even though far less than the 28,000 providers voted, the United Federation of Teachers won the right to represent them all because a majority of those who did vote voted to unionize.
Tammie Miller, who looks after six children at her home near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, hailed the results.
“Unionizing is the only hope that we have as child care providers to make our voices heard and to get the respect we deserve,” Ms. Miller said. “We were totally isolated. We were being ignored by city and state agencies.”
Many child care workers favored unionization because they were dissatisfied with their pay, averaging $19,000 a year, according to a recent survey, and with the lack of health insurance and paid vacations.
This is the largest successful unionization campaign in the city since 1960, when 45,000 teachers joined the United Federation of Teachers.
Several unions agreed over the past year that the teachers’ union would seek to unionize the child care workers in New York City while the Civil Service Employees Association would try to unionize child care providers in the suburbs and upstate. The C.S.E.A. has already unionized 7,500 of the 25,000 workers it was given jurisdiction over...click to continue.
