Worthy Wages in the Emerald City: Worker- and Director-Led Childcare Movements in Seattle, 1984–2006

We have wiped ten thousand bottoms, we have dried ten thousand tears.We have served ten thousand crackers, we have calmed ten thousand fears.We don't want to be impoverished for the next ten thousand years.We deserve a worthy wage.On a rainy Thursday in April 1991, a crowd of 1,800 daycare workers and childcare advocates donned boots and umbrellas and took to the streets of Seattle to demand better pay for the city's daycare workers. Bosses—themselves poorly paid center directors—organized with workers to shut down seventy-five daycare centers for all or part of the day. Parents and children joined the "parade," as did the city's mayor, Norman Rice.1 Seattle's 1991 "Worthy Wages Day" brought national attention to the issue of childcare's "hidden subsidy" and sparked a vibrant campaign that continued throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century.2While Seattle became the epicenter of the movement, Worthy Wage chapters emerged in over thirty states, Canada, and Washington, DC (fig. 1).3 The Worthy Wage movement brought to a boil a childcare labor crisis that had been simmering for decades. As maternal labor force participation grew dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century, increasing from approximately 20 percent of married women with children in the workforce in 1950 to approximately 70 percent in 1995, a low-wage childcare workforce expanded rapidly as well.4Seattle produced the most active childcare labor movement in the United States, but it also typified the themes and dynamics of childcare employee activism in many other cities at the turn of the twenty-first century. The movements in Seattle showcase the challenges of improving the social and economic value of childcare work, particularly in the contexts of retrenchment and privatization.The childcare labor movement in Seattle proceeded through three stages: an advocacy stage, a union stage focused on center-based workers, and a union stage focused on home-based providers. During the first stage, grassroots Worthy Wage activists built a cooperative public education campaign. Daycare center directors and workers collaborated to inform the public of undercompensation in childcare with the goal of pressuring policymakers to improve childcare funding. In 1998, the Worthy Wage Task Force affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) District 925 to form the Child Care Union Project, an effort focused on organizing center-based workers. Wishing to respect workers' desire to maintain cooperative relationships with directors, and acknowledging that most centers had limited room in their budgets to increase wages, SEIU bet that they could improve wages by exerting their power in Washington State to expand state funding for childcare. When this strategy failed, they shifted gears toward organizing home-based family childcare providers. Building on the work of Local 880 in Illinois, SEIU found that family childcare providers, many of whom served clients with childcare subsidies, had a more direct relationship with public funding. They established an employment relationship that allowed providers to bargain directly with the state of Washington.Examining these three stages concurrently offers several insights into the history of labor organizing in the childcare field, with broader implications for our understanding of labor struggles in the small, often home-based "shops" of care work.First, daycare organizing was typified by a cooperative rather than an antagonistic approach—between workers and center directors and workers and families. Second, organizers found that this cooperative approach to labor activism was more effective in segments of the industry where larger portions of funding came from government sources. Funding mechanisms proved more important than the spatial status of the worksite (home versus center) in determining the relative successes of labor campaigns. The wins of family childcare workers, in comparison with center-based daycare workers, surprised those who believed sharing a worksite was critical to building a union. The history of childcare worker organizing in the 1990s shows how, amid neoliberal social policy, labor activists successfully responded to the exploitation of waged care workers by harnessing, to workers' advantage, the solubility of divisions between workplace/home, employer/employee, and labor/love.In the decades before the Seattle campaign, childcare had become an industry. Between 1967 and 1990, the number of childcare centers tripled nationwide, and the number of children served quadrupled.5 The industry encompassed a patchwork of options, to which parents had varying degrees of access. While relatively affluent families could hire private household providers (nannies and au pairs), daycare centers and family childcare homes offered a more affordable option to a wider range of families. Daycare centers ranged from corporate chains and small businesses to a variety of nonprofit centers run out of converted houses, community centers, and church basements. Family childcare businesses in providers' homes operated along a continuum of state oversight, with some providers licensed by the state and many unlicensed and unregulated. Overlaid onto the myriad of childcare types was a complicated system of public funding consisting of both vouchers and tax credits. For parents, the complexity of both care types and funding approaches translated into care that few families could easily access or afford. For workers, the complexity translated into difficulty identifying a funding source from which to demand better pay.Poverty wages plagued the childcare field. In 1989, childcare workers in Seattle earned an average of $5.21 per hour.6 Many of Seattle's daycare staff, like others nationwide, worked in small centers with fewer than fifteen employees, most of whom worked closely with parents and center directors (fig. 2).7 While corporate chains had expanded rapidly since the 1970s, chains represented only 6 percent of centers used nationwide, and for-profit care only 35 percent of all childcare centers in the United States. The other 29 percent of daycare centers operating for profit were run independently by private proprietors.8 While some of these centers ran as successful businesses, most operated on thin profit margins, a situation that made it challenging to compensate providers fairly. Fewer than one-third of childcare workers in Seattle received fully covered health benefits, and more than 40 percent worked a second job.9 Unsurprisingly, childcare had the notorious distinction of being among the jobs with the highest rates of turnover nationwide: over 40 percent of staff members left each year.10Although childcare was unique in some ways, it also reflected the larger service sector. The patchwork of formal and informal worksites and public and private funding streams characterized segments of the healthcare and education fields. In many service sector worksites, relationships between workers and management could be close and collaborative, including during union campaigns.11 In care work, the employment relationship was often shaped by a third party, from children and families to students and patients. Organizing approaches often linked the interests of care providers and care recipients.12Distinguishing childcare in some ways was the absence of a "responsible party" onto whom childcare workers could directly demand higher wages. Teachers, nurses, and home healthcare providers have institutional adversaries in labor disputes—hospitals, school districts, or county agencies. As Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein have shown, home healthcare workers allied with patients to put pressure on government agencies and to avoid transferring their economic struggles to patients.13 Public school teachers have formed similar alliances with students and parents to make demands on school districts.14 Unlike public school students or hospital patients, most families pay out of pocket for childcare.15Childcare workers also share with nurses, teachers, and home healthcare workers the disproportionate representation of women among their ranks. Women represent roughly 95 percent of childcare workers nationwide.16 Many other forms of care work—nursing, teaching, care for the elderly and infirm—are disproportionately performed by women and associated with women's labor. But childcare, perceived as a commodified form of mothering, is socially coded as women's work perhaps more than any other form of labor.17 This relationship between childcare and mother work made it challenging for care workers to push their labor struggle beyond a zero-sum game with parents, particularly with mothers.In the late 1960s and 1970s, parents, childcare workers, and feminists of many stripes had come together to demand expanded public funding for childcare, with a vocal coalition of liberal and radical feminists and welfare rights activists calling for free, round-the-clock, and universal childcare.18 Childcare activists in this period often linked the struggles of parents to find affordable and high-quality childcare with the difficulty of workers to secure a livable wage.19 In the 1980s, however, the Reagan administration slashed a variety of social welfare programs, including childcare funding. The privatization of social services in the 1980s contributed to the difficulties of organizing for expanded public care responsibility in the 1990s. For many neoliberals, the patchwork approach to childcare provision, in which families are largely responsible for providing or purchasing care, represented what Melinda Cooper has called an "equilibrium state of the family in a free-market order, a state of mutual dependence and self-sufficiency." Federal overhaul of welfare and the replacement of Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) sought to reinstate that order.20 While the federal government shifted the responsibilities for care provision onto the family and the market, childcare labor activists in Washington and other states fought for childcare funding expansion. They wished to insulate families and workers from the ravages of the market. In these aims, however, they found themselves increasingly isolated. Neoliberalism not only strengthened channels of upward redistribution but also strained the downwardly redistributive aims of feminist, antiracist, and antipoverty movements, as Lisa Duggan has argued.21Several efforts to address undercompensation in childcare preceded the Worthy Wage movement. In two regions of the country where local governments chose to continue funding federally established childcare centers after the end of World War II, unions made inroads into organizing workers in publicly funded centers. In the 1960s, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) organized daycare and Head Start workers in California, while the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) organized daycare workers in New York City. In the 1970s, SEIU and the United Auto Workers (UAW) also organized childcare workers, both focusing on publicly funded centers. By the early 1990s, these relatively small undertakings had organized fewer than 4 percent of the country's two million childcare workers.22The limited nature of contract unionism within childcare belied the breadth of labor organizing in the industry. In the 1970s, daycare employees formed grassroots coalitions in many parts of the country, including Boston, Madison, Minneapolis, and Berkeley. These groups emphasized the shared interests of childcare workers and the families using their services. Often coming out of the women's movement, activists linked undercompensation in childcare to the larger undervaluation of women's paid and unpaid labor.23The most nationwide of these groups, the Child Care Employee Project (CCEP), formed in 1978 in Berkeley, California.24 Created by a group of childcare workers who had begun meeting informally to discuss workplace issues, CCEP soon broadened its goals, seeking to bring national attention to the issue of childcare compensation.25 Throughout the 1980s, CCEP gathered data and educated the public about the childcare workforce. It was the CCEP that developed the idea for a Worthy Wage campaign.In 1989, CCEP published the National Child Care Staffing Study (NCCSS), a document that daycare activists around the country drew on for over a decade. Examining 227 childcare centers in five cities, including Seattle, the study concluded that "inadequate compensation is fueling a rapidly increasing and damaging exodus of trained personnel." Worker compensation, it found, was the single greatest predictor of childcare quality. The authors argued that relying on the low pay of workers to make childcare affordable to families was an untenable solution to America's childcare crisis.26While the study made national news, earning a lengthy spread in the New York Times, it had a particular impact in Seattle.27 Not only was Seattle one of the five cities studied; it also had a history of childcare activism dating to the late 1960s, when liberal and radical feminists joined efforts in the fight for universal childcare. With a supportive flank of activists from the old left who were receptive to women's issues, and a history of feminists organizing abortion referral services and women's health clinics, Seattle offered a unique environment for addressing issues of social reproduction.28By the 1990s, Seattle's political climate for childcare organizing was more tepid. On the one hand, voters had elected diverse leaders who showed interest in issues of social and economic justice.29 Governor Gary Locke and Mayor Norm Rice set precedents, respectively, as the first Chinese American state governor in the United States and first African American mayor of Seattle.30 Both Locke and Rice took childcare labor activists seriously and made efforts, albeit limited, to respond to their demands. Political economic transformations throughout the 1980s had narrowed the landscape of political possibility, however. Policies passed during the Reagan and Bush administrations had shifted federal support for childcare away from direct funding (which tended to favor lower-income families) and toward tax credits (which tended to benefit more affluent families).31 The responses of both Locke and Rice to childcare labor activism emphasized career development, training, and efficient management over infusions of cash that would have equitably supported the entire workforce.32 These solutions protected state and municipal budgets from the added strains of social welfare policies voters were increasingly unwilling to bear.33 Obscured by progressive politics and visible measures of expanding political equality, inequality rose. As the headquarters of Microsoft and Boeing, Seattle was an increasingly wealthy hub of the growing tech and aerospace empire of the West Coast. Money streamed into Seattle, much of it remaining in the hands of a few corporate barons.34 Childcare workers underwrote this economic expansion, but they enjoyed few of its rewards.To meet the needs of childcare workers who made the city's growth possible, Seattle's Worthy Wage movement built a campaign that situated the problem and potential solutions within the city's larger political economy. Recognizing that most parents could not afford to pay more for childcare, Worthy Wage activists used work stoppages not to place pressure on employers to raise wages but to alert the public to the problem of underfunding in childcare. The close relationships and allegiances between daycare centers workers and their directors and between daycare workers and the families they served precluded approaches that would have shifted the burden onto families even temporarily. Worthy Wage activists deployed a public education campaign designed to inform voters of the relationship between compensation and childcare quality in hopes of spurring legislative efforts to expand state and local childcare funding.In 1984, a group of Seattle daycare directors began meeting to improve the economic and cultural valuation of childcare.35 They were frustrated by the high rates of turnover in their centers and their inability to offer workers wages that would keep them in the field. For several years before the 1991 daycare shutdown, the Child Care Directors Association of Greater Seattle (CDAGS) organized an annual Week of the Young Child parade, calling it a Worthy Wage parade for the first time in 1988.36That daycare directors led the first Worthy Wage center closures appears unusual when compared with more traditional labor actions, usually directed against the boss, not by her. However, directors' actions, and their role in bringing about the first Worthy Wage center closures, make more sense when contextualized within the relational ecosystem of many daycare centers. While directors managed (and in some cases, owned) centers, their compensation rarely exceeded by a substantive margin what other daycare workers earned.37 The blurred economic lines common in the service sector were particularly hazy in daycare.38Daycare workers involved with the Worthy Wage movement—who largely worked in small mom-and-pop businesses, nonprofit centers, and parent cooperatives—often saw their bosses as allies rather than adversaries.39 As childcare worker and activist Barb Wiley explained, "Center directors were the working poor." They made "ridiculous wages" because "it was undervalued women's work."40 Directors often wore a number of hats. With limited substitute pools, directors stepped in when teachers were out sick.41 Melissa Parson, a worker at the Hilltop Center, recalled that many directors and teachers shared close relationships, the director often mentoring and guiding teachers in the profession.42 Workers and directors were united by their close working relationships and their shared sense that the root of the problem was a society-wide undervaluation of the work of caring for children.In addition to the connections that many workers felt with their bosses, many also felt strong connections with the families they served (fig. 3). When reflecting on their activism decades later, several Worthy Wage activists noted their empathy for daycare consumers, often single mothers who were themselves underpaid. Lauren Tozzi explained that when she worked in a center for children with autism, "it just stirred so much rage in me that women worked so hard [to meet their children's needs] and when they are doling out the blame they are the first ones who are targeted."43 While Tozzi spoke about a specific kind of blame placed on mothers of children with disabilities, she was acutely aware of the way society placed the bulk of responsibility for child-rearing on mothers. Working mothers already faced social blame for being unwilling or unable to parent full-time. Melissa Parson shared Tozzi's sense that the undervaluation of her labor stemmed from the broader undervaluation of all women's labor and that the struggles of childcare workers and parents were intimately intertwined. While barely able to afford her rent, Parson also empathized with mothers spending half their salaries on childcare.44 Though both Tozzi's and Parson's recollections reflect the decades they have had to consider their activism in the Worthy Wage movement, they also help to explain why Worthy Wage activists emphasized public over parental responsibility for childcare funding.Washington, like other states, largely relied on the market to fund childcare, with some subsidy programs for low-income families and childcare tax credits for middle- and upper-income families.45 In the second half of the 1990s, as part of the Clinton administration's welfare reform program, the federal government overhauled childcare funding mechanisms, combining several programs into one funding structure, the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF).46 Under the CCDF, states could set family income eligibility limits up to 85 percent of the state median income.47 Washington State set its eligibility at 56 percent, placing it in the bottom third of all states for ease of access.48 These subsidies were generally provided through vouchers rather than direct payments to childcare providers.49 Both the city of Seattle and King County also had modest subsidy programs for low-income families, but childcare workers argued that these funds did not meet the needs of most families and did little to improve wages among childcare workers (fig. 4).50In other majority-woman, low-wage occupations, workers had had some successes with the comparable worth strategy, which challenged gender-based wage discrimination at an occupational level. Proponents of comparable worth argued that gender-based discrimination occurred not only through employers paying women less for the same work but also through employers paying less for occupations in which women predominated. In 1983, AFSCME filed suit against the state of Washington, alleging that the state paid teachers, secretaries, and childcare workers wages far below those of male-dominated professions on state payrolls. An investigation found that childcare workers suffered the most, paid 36 percent below comparable professions that were dominated by men. In 1986, Washington State settled out of court and agreed to wage increases between 1987 and 1991.51 Such a strategy, however, had its limitations. Most daycare workers were employed not by the state of Washington but instead by independent businesses and nonprofits. Comparable-worth strategies had been most effective for addressing wage discrimination in large employers with a range of occupations.52 While daycare centers on university campuses or public schools met that description, the vast majority of childcare centers did not lend themselves to a comparable-worth approach.Instead, Worthy Wage activists focused on raising public awareness of the links between compensation and quality in hopes parents would urge policymakers to expand public funding (fig. 5). In one of the earliest public education tactics, Worthy Wage activists sent children home with a "Full Cost of Care Invoice" to inform parents of the fees they would pay if providers were compensated fairly. Parents opened their children's backpacks to find two sheets of paper. The first announced an "Enrollment Fee Increase" with the new wage rates. "These fees," they explained, "reflect more accurately our costs of providing quality care for your child. The new fees will go into effect April 1, 1992. Thank you." The next page clarified: "April Fools!! If you thought that was scary, try working for $5.21/hour."53 Attached on the final page was a list of actions parents could take on Worthy Wage Day to show solidarity with workers.54 The voluntary actions relied on parents feeling enough concern to get involved and sheltered families from the full burden of childcare costs.Other public education tactics viscerally linked compensation with dwindling childcare availability. At the second Worthy Wage parade in 1992, activists held a "funeral march," carrying coffins to mark centers that had gone out of business, unable to operate within the privately funded childcare system.55 Adapting a classic movement song to create the "Battle Hymn of the Child Care Workers," activists marched through the streets singing, "You may think the hugs and smiles from kids should keep us very snug. / It should be enough to sing all day of dinosaurs and bugs. / But who can pay the rent with smiles or buy our food with hugs. / We deserve a worthy wage."56 The lyrics highlighted a misperception of childcare labor as merely a source of "pin money" for the women who performed it. Without rejecting the meaning derived from childcare, Worthy Wage activists educated the public about the realities of care work.The public education campaign proved impossible for Seattle politicians to ignore. Largely in response to the Worthy Wage movement, Seattle mayor Norm Rice created a Child Care Staffing Task Force (CCSTF). In an April 1992 press conference, Rice announced his stance: "Right now, we pay our child care workers like they were flipping burgers, not shaping the values and potential of the next generation."57 He charged the task force with researching the problem and providing recommendations.58 The CCSTF offered some creative approaches, but these were limited by a business-centric ethos of fiscal management. In the centerpiece accomplishment of the CCSTF, businesses partnered with childcare centers to provide in-kind donations and to help directors learn efficient budgeting and personnel policies.59 These partnerships may have helped individual centers reduce costs, but they fell short of the large-scale infusion of cash desperately needed to shore up childcare wages.Some activists involved with the Worthy Wage movement suggested that workers' sense of solidarity with families should not limit the range of tactics they were willing to use. Demanding more militancy of childcare labor activists, they argued that workers would not win higher wages or status until they shifted some of their burden onto families.60 Some argued that the preference for public education stemmed from care workers' propensity to sacrifice and gendered socialization to put others first.61 These concerns expressed a frustration among some childcare labor activists who believed parents would not make demands of their governments until more of the burden rested on their shoulders. The connections that many daycare workers felt, with directors and with families, could propel all parties to vocalize the inequalities and injustices of the childcare system. But the strategy these connections produced—public education campaigns designed to encourage public action for legislative change—had limited power within the larger political economy. As one former childcare worker and Worthy Wage activist explained, "It's not like the mine owner. . . . There's no bad guy to really fight against."62It did not escape Worthy Wage activists, however, that companies like Boeing and Microsoft grew on the backs of low-wage workers who provided care to their employees' children. Worthy Wage activists distributed report cards to businesses, offering a grade for how well the company met the childcare needs of its employees.63 The Worthy Wage Task Force sent a letter, along with petitions and informational materials, to Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, offering to work together to address the city's childcare crisis by creating on-site daycare at Microsoft.64 When they did not receive a response, they presented a "Poopy Diaper award" to Microsoft at the 1997 Worthy Wage Day rally.65Other activists within the movement viewed the "bad guy" in childcare as the society-wide undervaluation of women's caring labor. Marcy Whitebook of CCEP and Jim Morin, a childcare director and compensation activist in Wisconsin, built this critique into a short parody. In "If the Shoe Fits: A Worthy Wages Fairy Tale," they described a kingdom in which a king who "always spoke of how much he loved children and how important they were for the land" cast a spell on the women of the kingdom to exploit their labor: "The spell was a powerful spell. . . . Women believed the myth even when they didn't have enough money to care for their own children, had to work second jobs or take in more children than the rules permitted. . . . [They] would even chant in public, 'We love kids; we're not in it for the money!'"66 By explaining childcare workers' willingness to sacrifice as a "spell," Whitebook and Morin attempted to name an issue that often curtailed the militancy of the childcare labor movement. The "spell" nomenclature cast the divide between care for children and care for oneself as an illusion, one that could be shattered by recognizing that accepting low wages in the name of service to children was not a noble sacrifice but complicity with gender and class exploitation.Attempting to build an analytic of exploitation that described the childcare system holistically, Worthy Wage activists often elided a pressing critique of racial exploitation. Women of color composed nearly a third of the childcare workforce nationwide and at least a quarter of the childcare workforce in Seattle, yet most of the city's Worthy Wage activists were white.67 Aware that the demographics of their movement did not represent the workforce and wishing to change that, the Worthy Wage Task Force tried different strategies to address the underrepresentation of women of color, including both internal anti-bias work and outreach and leadership training for childcare workers in minoritized communities.68The scant literature on the Worthy Wage movement has analyzed the successes and failures of these attempts to build cross-racial childcare alliances.69 For many childcare workers of color, however, the racial issues in childcare were often as pressing as those of compensation. The Child Care Employee Project and Worthy Wage activists consistently emphasized that improving compensation was the most important lever for improving quality, and most workers of color did not contest those claims. At the same time, the activism of Black, Latina, and Asian American childcare workers suggested that "quality" had a multiplicity of meanings in the childcare community.In addition to the problems of underfunding and high rates of turnover across the childcare system, families of color also dealt with culturally inappropriate and largely monolingual childcare. Efforts to improve the quality of care for children of color, to develop bilingual childcare, and to address underfunding in centers serving children from minoritized communities began with the African-American Child Care Task Force, led by