A follow-up to “How Four Black Women Changed Labor Organizing Forever”, this article captures the contract fight that followed and the genius and fortitude required to create one of the most important unions in U.S. history.
How a childcare worker and mom living and working in Minnesota’s Iron Range would like to see the industry better support workers and children alike.
Child care is both hard to find and increasingly expensive for families. The average price of licensed child care for a U.S. family is nearly $11,000 per year, which is 33 percent of the median household income for single-parent families.
The victory was a big moment for a labor movement largely led by immigrants and women of color — two groups whose domestic work has historically been undervalued and excluded from labor protection laws.
After the pandemic decimated the child care industry, parents are now routinely waiting years for care and doing anything they can to get off a waitlist.
“We have a system that places far too high a burden on families paying for the high price of care, and for providers to operate on very, very thin margins, so they can keep their doors open and meet the needs of families.”
As the pandemic has underscored, the practice of calling on families to pay unaffordable sums for child care while paying early educators poverty-level wages was never really sustainable, and it’s time for that to change.
Students tend to measure fair compensation on two scales. How many years of training and/or dollars of tuition did a worker have to invest to become “qualified” for the job? And how important is that worker’s labor to the rest of society?
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