After a historic vote, thousands of California child care workers are now eligible to join the Child Care Providers United union. One member of the new union, Charlotte Neal, said this could not have been formed at a better time as her profession struggles to make ends meet during the pandemic. Neal has been a child care provider for 19 years, and for the first time in her career, she can finally call herself a union member. “It’s a long time coming. I’m excited because now child care providers have a voice and we are essential workers,” Neal said. Continue […]

  By an overwhelming margin, and after a 17-year campaign that started with lobbying and ended with successful organizing, AFSCME and the Service Employees scored a joint big win in California, winning recognition to represent at least 40,000 state-employed child care workers there. Presumed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden immediately congratulated the workers on their victory and declared in a tweet that he wants that victory to be extended nationwide and that he would use his position in the White House to make it easier for childcare workers across the entire nation to unionize. The win in California is the […]

A 17-year organizing campaign in California culminated this week in the successful unionization of 45,000 child care providers—the largest single union election America has seen in years. The campaign is a tangible achievement that brings together union power, political might, and social justice battles for racial and gender equality. Now, the hard part begins. Child Care Providers United (CCPU), the umbrella group now representing workers across the state, is a joint project of several powerful SEIU and AFSCME locals in California. Those unions divided up the state by counties, and workers will be members of either SEIU or AFSCME depending […]

Publicly funded child care providers in California have voted overwhelmingly to form a union, marking what organizers believe is the biggest U.S. union organizing election victory in years. Roughly 43,000 child care providers will now be able to negotiate with the state over a contract that could impact the funding and training they receive for their work. The election was the result of a 17-year campaign waged by public-sector unions to pass state legislation allowing these workers to bargain collectively. The workers, who provide child care to low- and middle-income families generally in home-based businesses, get subsidies from the state. […]