Child Care Workers Get Right to Unionize (NY)

[Omaha Steve]

Source: New York Times

Child Care Workers Get Right to Unionize

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: May 12, 2007

Gov. Eliot Spitzer signed an executive order yesterday that gives 60,000 home-based child care providers the right to unionize, opening the door to one of the largest organizing drives in decades in New York State.

Two of the state’s most powerful unions, the United Federation of Teachers and the Civil Service Employees Association, lobbied for the executive order, saying it would lift many child care workers out of poverty. The governor’s move will also open the door to large membership increases for the two unions.


Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Gov. Eliot Spitzer in Albany on Tuesday. On Friday he signed an executive order for child care providers.

The executive order covers providers who care for the children of low-income workers whose day care is subsidized by the federal and state governments. Labor leaders say that if and when the providers join a union, unions will seek to negotiate with the state to increase the rates the providers receive and to obtain health benefits for them.

“I feel exuberant about this,” said Nila Edwards, a provider who cares for nine children at her home in East New York. “We need a union. We want a union so we can have benefits, so that we can get decent pay, so that we can be recognized as professionals.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/nyregion/12childcare.html?_r=1&oref=slogin