Lawmakers To Announce Plan To Let Some Day Care Workers Unionize
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Two Albany lawmakers plan to announce legislation today that will allow day care workers who watch low-income children in their homes to unionize.
Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat, a Democrat, and state Senator Nicholas Spano, a Republican, have introduced the legislation nearly seven months into a statewide union-organizing campaign.
If passed, the legislation will give about 52,000 day care workers statewide, including about 30,000 in the city, the right to unionize and to engage in collective bargaining with the government.
“These workers are organizing for the same reason that workers organize everywhere,” a spokesman for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, Jonathan Rosen, said yesterday. “They want respect, they want a living wage, they want health care, and they want to bargain on a bunch of different levels.”
Mr. Rosen said ACORN and the United Federation of Teachers have created a new union to be called the UFT-ACORN Family Day Care Providers Union, which will represent the workers if the legislation becomes law.
He said the two organizations have collected 6,000 union authorization cards from the day care workers since July and plan to continue aggressively pursuing support for the measure with Albany lawmakers.
It was unclear yesterday whether Governor Pataki or Mayor Bloomberg would support the legislation. Messrs. Espaillat and Spano are scheduled to be at UFT headquarters in Lower Manhattan today. The union president, Randi Weingarten, and ACORN leaders will also be on hand.
In July a spokeswoman for the city’s Administration for Children’s Services told The New York Sun that the day care providers – who are considered independent contractors – are paid a flat weekly rate based on a 30-hour workweek. An ACORN study found that the average annual pay for the providers is $19,933 in the city.
A successful effort to unionize could mean more public dollars going to pay for wages and benefits during a time of rising health care, pension, and Medicaid costs for taxpayers. To date, Illinois is the only state that has enacted this type of legislation.
