WHEREAS:

Oregon AFSCME Council 75 and Child Care Providers Together (CCPT) Local 132 represent licensed family child care providers across Oregon; and

WHEREAS:

For over a decade, working families in Oregon and across the country have faced chronic shortages of child care options with sharply declining family child care numbers exacerbating the difficulty for union members to find child care for children under age 2 and care for early mornings, nights and weekends; and

WHEREAS:

The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant impacts on working families needing and relying on child care with many providers’ doors closing, adding to the shortage of reliable child care. This crisis has had a disproportionate impact on women, with nearly 1 out of 4 women reporting job loss due to lack of child care; and

WHEREAS:

Family child care providers and child care workers are predominantly women, with a majority of family child care providers identifying as women of color; and

WHEREAS:

Many of AFSCME’s members and other parents nationwide encounter significant barriers to finding and securing reliable, affordable, available, accessible and safe child care as do other unions’ members across the country, thus placing many critical service workers in impossible situations of choosing between keeping their jobs and economic security or their children’s safety, care and well-being; and

WHEREAS:

Industries and workplaces where workers have union representation have higher job security, lower turnover and safer working conditions that result in more effective, reliable and safer services to the people they serve. Union child care provides working families dedicated and high-quality care and support; and

WHEREAS:

The child care industry is a vital economic engine that is a necessary and integral part of the social infrastructure that makes it possible to keep our nation working by enabling parents to work. Union child care provides the social and educational structures for our nation’s infants, toddlers and young children; and

WHEREAS:

Family child care programs are historically underfunded and do business within a dual-market system under the economics of both state-funded, subsidized child care and a local private-pay market which squeezes family child care programs from both sides financially, while also adding the pressures of funding a workforce under post-COVID-19 pandemic realities; and

WHEREAS:

Oregon AFSCME Council 75 recognizes that Oregon doesn’t work without child care. In 2009, AFSCME Child Care Providers Together and Oregon AFSCME Council 75 launched an initiative to connect union families with developmentally appropriate, accessible, union-owned family child care programs of high quality, and since 2005 have continued a mission to connect licensed family child care providers with union representation, trainings, business and networking support and more; and

WHEREAS:

Oregon AFSCME Council 75 and Oregon CCPT recognize and commend the AFSCME Free College programs in Early Childhood and Early Childhood Teacher. We also recognize that many family child care providers and early learning and care workers who are members of AFSCME did not have the AFSCME Free College option and are burdened by a high student debt-to-income ratio with decades of payments and mounting interest.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED:

AFSCME will recommit to and build on previously adopted child care resolutions from past conventions to nationally promote “Buy Union Child Care,” to connect union members from within AFSCME and within AFL-CIO-affiliated unions with unionized child care providers across the country; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED:

AFSCME will push for congressional funding to support child care providers in growing and maintaining their programs nationwide including:

1. Funding direct grants to family child care providers, passed through dollars to states and tribes; and
2. Funding SBA low-interest or zero-interest loans to new and existing family child care providers for capital improvements and startup costs; and
3. Funding for states to significantly and strategically increase staffing pools while also funding grants to child care programs to increase staffing and increase compensation to competitive and living-wage levels; and
4. Funding to states to offer retirement benefits and health care reimbursements to their child care workforces as they do to other public employees; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED:

AFSCME shall lobby for family child care providers, their staff and all child care workers regardless of employer or owner status to be named as “public employees” by federal law or executive order for the purposes of student loan forgiveness and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program so that all child care workers can be recognized for their public service; and

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED:

AFSCME will support exploration and development of innovative programs to support family child care provider members and AFSCME members employed in the public or private sector in early learning and care, now and in the future.

SUBMITTED BY:
Frederick Yungbluth, Jr., President
Meredith Hickman, Secretary
AFSCME Council 75
Oregon