A campaign began yesterday to organize the state’s 52,000 home day-care providers. Leaders of the campaign called it New York’s largest union-organizing effort in decades.

The United Federation of Teachers, New York State United Teachers, and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as Acorn, are heading the drive.

Inclusion of the workers in a union would require legislative approval, organizers said. If that approval is granted and the workers choose to form a union, they could opt to affiliate with an existing union or form their own.

More than 22,000, or about 40%, of the state’s providers of home day-care work in New York City. About 30 of them, many with their children, were present at a press conference and rally yesterday morning at the New York Community Church on the Upper East Side, bearing signs with messages in Spanish and English such as “We are not just baby sitters,” “Can’t afford to catch your child’s cold,” and “My children eat just as much as your children.”

The day-care workers receive government subsidies to watch children from low-income families in both pre-school and after-school settings. In New York City, providers receive payments through the Human Resources Administration or the Administration of Children’s Services, with most of the money coming from federal sources, though the city and state also contribute.

The Human Resources Administration pays for child care for parents who are on public assistance, and Children’s Services does the same for parents who are not on public assistance. According to the latter agency, maximum annual income for qualifying households ranges from $34,356 for a family of two to $56,724 for families of six or more.

The types of home child care for which providers receive government subsidies include group family health care, with settings of between seven and 12 children, and family day-care, with between three and six charges, as well as care by license-exempt providers for no more than two children other than their own.

According to a spokeswoman for Children’s Services, Lisi de Bourbon, the day-care providers, who are considered “independent contractors,” are paid a flat weekly rate based on a 30-hour work-week.

This policy leaves day-care providers such as Joy Lacoa frustrated. She said she has been working as a provider in Brooklyn for 10 years, caring for children between 6 months and 12 years old.

“I usually work 11 hours or more every day but don’t get paid for it,” Ms. Lacoa said. “The fact is we get treated unfairly.”

Licensed family-day-care providers receive between $125 and $135 a week per child, depending on the age of the child; licensed group providers make between $135 and $150 per child, and license-exempt providers receive between $88 and $95 per charge in subsidies each week. An Acorn-commissioned study indicates that the average yearly wage for licensed providers is $19,933 in New York City and $16,942 in the rest of the state.

The federal poverty line for a family of four in 2004 was an annual income of $18,850.

A day-care provider in the Bronx for the past 18 years, Melvina Vandross, told reporters she earns less than $19,000 a year and could not afford to pay the $280 cost of summer enrichment school for her son to catch up to his classmates by the beginning of the new academic year in September.

“These providers watch our precious children,” Acorn’s executive director, Bertha Lewis, said yesterday at the press conference. “It is an outrage that we don’t value the work they are doing and that we discriminate against these mostly low-income women of color and the families they serve.”

The chairman of the state Assembly’s Task Force on New Americans, Adriano Espaillat, said there was no reason why New York day-care providers should earn so little.

“This city has a $3 billion surplus, but the mayor and governor want to leave you behind,” Mr. Espaillat, a Democrat who is running for Manhattan borough president, said, addressing the crowd of day-care providers behind the podium.

A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, Paul Elliott, responded to Mr. Espaillat’s statement by saying that the mayor “has done more than anyone else to improve the quality of life of working men and women and their families.”

Attempts to reach a spokesman for Governor Pataki were unsuccessful.

If the day-care providers are successful in their pursuit of union membership, New York would be the second state in the country in which such workers are unionized. In February, the governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, signed an executive order allowing the 49,000 providers in his state to unionize.

The executive order notes that home day-care providers “are not state employees for the purposes of eligibility to receive statutory benefits because the state does not hire, supervise, or terminate their services.”