A victory for childcare workers is a victory for reproductive justice

Olivia Pace (she/her) is Black, biracial, queer woman writer, educator and organizer from the Portland metro area. Her work focuses on capitalism, politics, racial justice, chronic illness, climate change and sexual violence. She is an organizer with PDX Child Care Labor Alliance, and the Disarm PSU. She graduated Cum Laude from Portland State University in 2019, receiving her BA in Child and Family Studies and a minor in Black Studies.

Underneath the unnerving chaos of the 2020 United States Presidential Election, there were a number of local progressive wins across the country on November 3rd. The groundbreaking Measure 26-214 passed in Oregon’s Multnomah County, which includes the city of Portland. The passing of this measure means the implementation of universal, tuition free preschool for every 3 and 4-year-old in the county, and raising the wage of the average preschool worker in Multnomah County from $15 an hour, to just under $20 an hour (the average wage of preschool workers nationally is $11 an hour). The program will be funded through a marginal income tax on the county’s high income earners; 92% of the county’s residents will pay nothing. As a child care worker in this city, I know how sorely needed this is for workers in our community, let alone across the country. The success of Measure 26-214 highlights the necessity for labor struggles to continually expand out of the realm of our workplaces, and be a part of community struggles for social and economic justice. 

Teaching must be considered social justice work. Children are a marginalized group in our society, though they are rarely recognized as such. Children do not have autonomy over their everyday lives, or their bodies. Because of children’s positions in our society, they are easily subjected to abuse. Just like all other types of oppression, these conditions worsen as they intersect with other marginalized identities, causing children of color to face the brunt of these mechanisms of oppression and violence. 

Politicians have endless platitudes about the importance of taking care of children. Everyone can seem to agree that children are an important part of our society, and need to be treated with respect and dignity. One of the most glaring pieces of evidence that these platitudes are in fact disingenuous is the way child care workers, the people we task with teaching and empowering our children, are treated in this country. This is no different in a relatively progressive state like Oregon.

Before being laid off due to the coronavirus pandemic, I was a lead teacher in a preschool classroom at a child development center which cares for children ages six weeks to 5-years-old. The school I worked at has a clientele of mostly politically liberal, middle and higher income families, who pay around $18,000 in tuition a year. The school prided itself on championing social justice, equity and an anti-bias framework. Our directors referred to us as a team or a family, and to many came off as nice and unintimidating. Overall, working conditions seemed more than fair on the surface, and as teachers we were given a lot of freedom to express what many would describe as progressive views in the classroom and in our curriculum. 

This is why when we decided to unionize, despite having some serious grievances, we felt it would ultimately be an uncontroversial decision, given the values that the school put forward. 

My co-workers and I won our union on March 11th, 2020,  by a margin of 90%. Our demands included higher wages, the hiring of cleaning staff, and the inclusion of workers in the development of anti-bias trainings. We desperately needed so many of the changes that will be made under Measure 26-214. 

When we announced our union and publicly aired our workplace grievances, our school administration quickly launched into an anti-union campaign based on gas lighting and guilt tripping. Our boss, the owner of all three centers, sent out an all-staff email the night before our union vote to all staff stating that there was no guarantee a union could help us, our directors did not want a random third party interfering in our relationships, that she has always been there to listen to workers, and that her door has always been open. Undermining credibility in unionizing is a classic union-busting tactic. In reality, many workers did not even know what our boss looked like. Some didn’t even know her name. Many of the workers who were familiar with her had been personally disrespected and disregarded by her. This dynamic worsened intensely once we won our union and began bargaining for our first contract. Additionally, our boss proposed to continue to pay poverty wages and write off workers’ concerns about how the pandemic has been handled at the schools as "dramatic" or "ill-informed."  

 While our bosses behavior is abhorrent, and she is certainly responsible for her actions, the reality is that this is par for the course in terms of bosses reacting to union organizing, even in fields and workplaces which claim to prioritize social justice. Under capitalism, the interests of child care providers, child care workers, and families are not aligned. Child care providers own a business. This is usually their livelihood, and so their goal is to create a profit. This gives them incentive to set tuition rates high, and keep workers’ wages low. This obviously conflicts with the workers interests, who are also trying to make enough money to pay their bills and get by. The family’s ultimate interest is obtaining childcare. This can pit them against providers who may run their prices up, as well as workers, because workers may go on strike, or leave their jobs in the middle of the year if their needs are not being met. Attempting to transform society, and fighting for more comprehensive public support in the meantime, through things like Measure 26-214,  is truly the only hope for the just treatment of child care workers, and all workers generally. 

As a union, we haven’t just met our bosses at the table. We prioritized community engagement from the beginning, and joined the Universal Preschool Now coalition, which helped to successfully pass Measure 26-14, and will ultimately do more to improve conditions for our field than anything our bosses could or would do on their own, especially in the current economic crisis. This measure will provide more funding for child care providers, pay preschool teachers a living wage, and eliminate the issue of cost for families seeking preschool. Our boss cannot reasonably be responsible for amending the many ways in which our society as a whole has failed in its treatment of workers and children. We cannot negotiate our way to a true valuing of social justice -- the problem is systemic, so the solution must be as well. We must build movement and wage battles for systemic and long-lasting changes. This is how we better our working conditions in a significant way, and create workplaces that genuinely align with the social justice politics they espouse.