This Day in Labor History: April 2, 1992

On April 2, 1992, Seattle mayor Norm Rice created the Child Care Staffing Task Force to deal with the city’s low-wage child care workers and how to improve their working conditions. This is just one moment in a part of labor history that deserves more attention–the rise of care work and trying to cover them under labor law.

Part of the legacy of the New Deal was the exclusion of care work from the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act. The short version of this is that there was no way to get labor law through the Senate without excluding basically any job that Black people did in the South. That meant farmworkers, most notably, but it also meant most care work. So part of our labor history in the nearly century since is the legal status of these workers and how we can fight to cover them under labor law. This goes on today, with some blue states creating collective bargaining rights for home care workers, such as in Rhode Island for example.

Then there’s the question of why we treat our care workers so poorly. We all rely on care workers at some point of our lives and it’s always when we and are families are most vulnerable. Whether it’s when we are children, new parents, in the hospital or in rehab, or in elder care, we rely on workers to keep us alive. And yet, we treat them horribly. This is hard, often very gross work, and yet we pay these workers minimum wage or slightly above. What more than this is a clearer sign of the broken nature of American capitalism?

Care workers have had a multi-decade fight for justice. Between 1967 and 1990, the number of child care providers in the United States tripled, as women entered the paid workforce at higher rates. But poverty wages dominated. In 1989, childcare workers in Seattle made on average a mere $5.21 an hour. They usually worked in small childcare centers with a few other employees. There was a rise in corporate childcare chains, but they only made up 6 percent of child care centers in the country. This made targeting employers very difficult and large-scale change through mass organizing almost impossible if focused at the individual employer level. Few knew the problems more than parents, who could not afford to spend more money on childcare (Lord knows it’s so expensive as is) but who knew that the workers they needed to keep their children fed and alive were also highly exploited. So it was not that hard to build alliances between workers and parents through the conversations that naturally took place every day between them.

Moreover, almost all these workers were women–about 95 percent nationwide. Care work of all types remain overwhelmingly female dominated, to the present. Going back to the 60s, there had been attempts to organize in various ways, with some big community coalitions in the 70s and unions such as American Federation of Teachers and United Auto Workers sometimes involved in organizing. This history of activism included Seattle. But it was hard to make serious advances given the structural problems. One thing that makes childcare organizing different as well is that it was often the childcare employers themselves leading the activism. They often made barely more than their employees. And of course that gave the whole movement a bit more appeal to a general public often sketchy about labor rights.

In April 1991, there was a big Worthy Wage parade of low wage child care workers, often including both the children and their parents. Also, Seattle’s new mayor, Norm Rice, came out for it. Rice wasn’t such a flaming left working class advocate or anything, but he was a solid liberal who had a lot of ambition for higher office. Building supporting in the city’s working class communities could both improve their lives and improve his lot. Worthy Wage Day had a lot of legs. The city became the center of a broader national movement for child care worker activism in the 90s, which spread to over 30 states and even into Canada.

Seattle’s childcare workers continued their activism and playing on the city’s liberalism and increasing tech oriented economy that relied on care workers as its underpinning, they were able to see political victories. Rice announced his task force on April 2, 1992, saying “Right now, we pay our child care workers like they were flipping burgers, not shaping the values and potential of our next generation.” I hate that framing; the person selling you a McRib also deserves respect, even if you don’t for ordering such an atrocity. But still, such framing had political value, unfortunately. But this also didn’t really lead to concrete victories anyway. The fight remained long and hard. Big companies did not do their part. The Worthy Wage Task Force gave Microsoft their 1997 Poopy Diaper Award for contributing so much to driving up the cost of living in Seattle and so little to fighting so that the service workers of the city could afford to live and work there. By the mid 90s, the Worthy Wage movement had done a great job of publicizing these issues, but winning victories remained a frustrating dream.

Over the years, Service Employees International Union has really taken the lead on care workers rights. SEIU has often run smart campaigns. They know that there’s not huge pots of money out there for workers and that the problem is systemic, so it’s generally tried to work on legislative solutions, to mixed success. SEIU and Worthy Wage first got together in Seattle in 1998. It was Local 925, i.e., the successor to the 9 to 5 Movement, that led the way within the labor movement. A few childcare providers involved in the movement quickly agreed to union contracts, but only about a dozen. Over time, the strategy finally moved to allowing family-based childcare providers to bargain directly with the state. But those providers were not only exempt from collective bargaining rights, but also subject to federal antitrust law.

So the focus from the union perspective came down to changing the collective bargaining laws. That’s been the strategy in states around the nation where Democrats have control of the government. In 2005, Governor Christine Gregoire signed such a bill, making Washington the second state in the country to allow it, only behind Illinois. In 2006, the family based child care providers organizing their first collectively bargained contract with the state. But for private providers, the struggle remains very real to the present. Simply put, we continue as a society to not value care workers.

I borrowed from Justine Modica, “Worthy Wages in the Emerald City: Worker and Director-Led Childcare Movements in Seattle, 1984-2006,” published in the May 2024 issue Labor, to write this post.

This is the 558th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.