It’s not just families that are caught in the childcare bind of high costs, quality issues, and low availability. Childcare providers also struggle, particularly with low wages.

The average childcare provider earns a salary of just $18,060 a year.¹⁴ Low salaries in turn lead to high turnover rates because of the financial hurdles faced by the childcare providers, many of whom are parents themselves. In fact, what can happen, particularly with childcare providers that care for children in their own homes, is that providers actually end up subsidizing the families whose children they watch. They end up paying out-of-pocket for food and educational supplies, but are unable to charge higher rates to parents for their time because many parents simply cannot afford to pay any higher rates.

Angenita is an in-home independent childcare provider in Illinois whose clients mainly come from a state-subsidized program.

In tears, Angenita had to tell her childcare assistant that she was going to delay paying her yet again because the state was behind on their payments for the children. She was embarrassed and horrified that she couldn’t pay her assistant for work that was already done, but she, herself, hadn’t been paid by the state in six months. The state program was supposed to work like clockwork: In-home childcare providers watched children that qualified for state subsidies, and the state paid the childcare providers those subsidies. In this case, the clock was broken.

Yet she kept her center open because “at that point I was dedicated to the field. I’d been in childcare for six months and didn’t have another job avenue immediately available. I was stuck. I already quit my other job. I also had parents relying on me everyday. I couldn’t just wake up and say, ‘Okay it’s all over. Find someone else to take care of the children.’ ”

She notes that with eight children in her care, if she stopped providing childcare then eight sets of parents would be forced to take time off work to find another sitter. And she knew these families well, knew they desperately needed her services in order to go to work to support their families—she was watching her sister’s children, and also children on her block. Another factor, Angenita’s a fighter: “I’m not one to accept failure. I had to think positively like, ‘Okay, the check is coming soon.’ I never imagined it would take that long.” While childcare providers are often woefully underpaid, this situation was over the top.

Angenita’s doorbell rang less than an hour after the tearful discussion. It was a union organizer named Maggie. Maggie sat down with Angenita and asked if she had any issues that need to be addressed with late checks from the state or other topics. “I said, ‘Late checks! I’ve never even gotten mine,’ and then I just started talking and talking,” she recalls. Maggie told Angenita that there are a lot of providers in the same situation, and that there are even providers who lost their homes because of the state’s failure to pay in a timely manner. Then she invited Angenita to an in-home childcare providers’ union organizing meeting, and asked her to speak.

Several days later Angenita went to that meeting. She stepped out the front door of her house and drove to the center of Chicago’s downtown. It was 1996. As she parked her car and entered a building with an old bicycle shop on the ground floor, she anticipated finally getting a chance to connect with other childcare providers in situations similar to hers.

Ready to take action, Angenita walked purposefully through the lobby to the elevator waiting area. The elevator door opened, Angenita pressed floor four, and her ride up began. Stepping out of the elevator, she turned and walked through an open door into a small conference room packed with at least forty women.

Angenita got up to speak about her role as a childcare provider and people listened. “I talked about the fact that I’m a teacher, a cook, a lawyer, a doctor, a nurse, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a mediator, a cleaner, a mind reader, and an employer as well as an employee, and I have not been paid for the services that I do render.”

The ice was broken. Women broke into applause, and cheers were called out after every title Angenita named. “Everyone was yelling. I'm a cook (Yeah!)! I’m a mind reader (Yeah!)! Yeah!!!”

Her speech continued. “There is a difference between a need and a want, and just like oxygen to breathe, we need a living wage to live. With all the many hats I wear daily the state only wants to pay me $2.53 an hour per child and I have not been paid yet for six months.”

The crowded room was awash with clapping and cheering.

The women who filled the room were also in-home childcare providers for the Illinois state childcare subsidy program in which the state allocates funds to providers based on a sliding scale of parent earnings. The state was behind in payments, not just for Angenita, who had been watching eight children a day for six months without pay, but for many other providers as well. On the day of the union meeting, Angenita was excited to share her predicament and experiences with other childcare providers and find out how to make a positive difference for everyone.

The organizing was a success. After banding together with the help of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and lobbying the Illinois state legislature, the childcare providers began to see real change.

“In 1999 we got a living wage increase from $19.18 to $20.50 per child per day from the state. In 2000 we got another increase for the cost of living, and in 2004 the federal subsidized food program increased payments for the children’s food,” notes Angenita.

In 2005 the SEIU had an election, the biggest in Illinois history and second biggest nationally, and 49,000 providers voted to officially unionize, becoming the first union of state-subsidized home childcare providers in the nation. These women and men are making history and positive changes for families right this very moment. As Angenita says, “We’re a powerful force when you think about it. We’re the people who take care of children after they enter the world.”

Angenita is not alone. Tens of thousands of family childcare providers in more than twelve states around the country are organizing through unions. For example, SEIU and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) are working together to organize over 45,000 family childcare providers in California. In Oregon 5,000 family childcare providers won the right to a union with AFSCME in 2005. They are now headed to the bargaining table to fight for health insurance and other benefits that childcare providers need.

Higher wages, benefits, and better public funding help both childcare workers and children. Low salaries and poor benefits lead to high provider turnover rates, creating unstable situations for our nation’s children. Increased wages, as well as funding for continuing education for childcare providers, are needed to attract, and retain, top quality providers. And the benefit of top quality providers is incalculable: “Millions of preschoolers are spending precious years caught in a maze of unstable, substandard settings that compromise their chances of succeeding in school. For them, the years of promise represent lost opportunity at a crucially formative stage in their development,” states a Carnegie Corporation report.¹⁵