Claim to dignity: as union organizing efforts take off, the lessons of community organizing could go a long way toward building a powerful movement of family childcare providers.

I'LL NEVER FORGET THE FIRST TIME I met Shirley Craig-head. In a voice made harsh by years of struggle and cigarettes, she outpreached any pastor as she addressed a room full of daycare providers. The spark of Shirley's oratory touched the gasoline of frustration felt by other middle-aged Black women whose meager paychecks from the state were three months late and who had moved way past the margins of economic survival. Within six years, Shirley and her sisters and brothers in DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality) had revamped the state's antiquated payroll system, won nearly $100,000 in back pay and, by 1996, made Rhode Island the only state in the country to offer fully paid health insurance to women who perform the back-breaking work of caring for other people's children.

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As I spent the next 10 years organizing with them, Shirley and other daycare providers taught me the value of a mother's labor, in all its forms. Looking back on the successes and failures of DARE's Home Daycare Justice Committee and its successor, the Day Care Justice Coop, I see clear lessons for the trade unions that have shown a growing interest in this group of workers.

Department of Labor statistics suggest that there are about 400,000 home-based childcare providers in the United States. Unions have been going after this potentially huge group of workers by putting their tremendous political clout into lobbying efforts to get permission from executive or legislative branches of government to represent them. These campaigns are accompanied by intensive efforts to convince providers to sign up for AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), SEIU (Service Employees International Union) or both.

Family childcare is a tricky occupation to organize under traditional union models. Trade unions in the U.S. are based on an employee/employer form of work. Since daycare providers are technically individual small businesses, unions generally see legal authorization at the state level as necessary to avoid charges of anti-trust activity in collective bargaining. Community organizing approaches to childcare organizing, on the other hand, grow out of traditions like welfare rights or neighborhood organizing, in which poor people of color demand collective redress outside legal structures, often based on notions of moral or social rights. As union organizing efforts take off, the lessons of community organizing could go a long way toward building a powerful movement of family childcare providers.

It's about race. And gender, and how those systems of oppression intersect under capitalism to devalue the labor of women of color. Without that analysis, we get trapped in counterproductive rhetoric about professionalism and quality of care.

While all childcare labor is shaped by the unpaid work of mothering, the experiences of women of color in the field carry the harshest tradition of exploitation. Under plantation slavery, older women were forced to care for the children of younger women, who were put to work in the fields. That history combined with labor economics allow us to translate the atypical work and funding structure of childcare into numbers that everyone can understand-an hourly wage.

A 2002 study published by the Day Care Justice Co-op entitled Mucho Trabajo, Poco Dinero: The Labor Economics of Family Child Care in Rhode Island's Subsidy Program determined that the average wage for family childcare providers working in the state's subsidy program was $2.76 an hour, less than half the minimum wage. Yet none of the legislation or executive orders drafted by unions makes any mention of the actual hourly wage or even the fact that the compensation is dismally low. Exposing the system would debunk the myth of overpaid (read: unionized) public workers. In Rhode Island, public debate did not make this distinction, and opponents of the providers seized on the fact that one of the union's leaders grossed $90,000 a year for her daycare home, a sum that does not reflect paid assistants, substantial operating costs, long hours and an extra 15 percent self-employment tax. Instead of shamefully low wages based on the economy of racism and sexism, the public heard about union fat cats.

In the '90s, financial analysis of childcare work was often made in comparison with pay rates of janitors, sanitation workers and other laborers. The mostly white and college-degreed childcare center workers invariably reacted with indignation that they were paid the same as or less than people who clean toilets or handle trash. The rallying cry went up that "we are professionals and should be paid as such."

A decade later, the very same unions that represent janitors, sanitation workers and other laborers are in danger of falling into the same trap by embracing establishment definitions of "quality" and "professionalism." Iowa's executive order even goes so far as to cite some pretty miserable statistics about the supposed low quality of care the state system currently offers. Aside from the obvious strategic question (are people inspired to put public money into a system when you tell them it sucks?), this line of argument helps fuel a national trend to intensify the industry's racial heirarchy by tying pay rates to subjective "quality" designations. Quality of care becomes the code that makes racial disparities in compensation legitimate.

We can't win playing by their rules. Taking advantage of the tremendous infrastructure of the unions shouldn't mean limiting our creative vision. The truth is that family childcare, like many forms of work that have evolved under the global economy, just doesn't fit the industrial capitalism model.

The Wagner Act of 1935 gave legal protection to workers who try to form unions, but at a great cost. Labor struggles, at least as far as trade unions go, were now codified by the state, and the unions' ability to pressure employers and collectively bargain were to be mediated by the National Labor Relations Board, or in the case of most state worksers, state labor relations boards. These bodies continue to determine the legal right of workers to collectively demand what they need. By relying on this industrial framework, unions have seen no choice but to seek formal "permission" from states in the form of legislation (Rhode Island, Washington, California and New York) or executive orders (Illinois, Iowa and Oregon) to put collective demands to the parties responsible.

Under this model, the contract can seem to be the end, rather than the means. Many providers in Rhode Island have expressed frustration that their day-to-day problems with payroll and licensing are set aside while the union's resources are focused on winning legislation to enable contract negotiation.

Perhaps the most problematic part of the decision to play within the system is the question of employee status. When providers in Rhode Island were in the final stages of the battle for health insurance, the secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO advised us to let the state labor relations board declare everyone employees so they could organize. In 2004, SEIU submitted legislation to have providers declared state employees and simultaneously requested the same ruling from the state labor relations board. Sure enough, in this strong union state, the board approved the request, and the courts struck it down. Through the intense public debate that surfaced all over talk radio and mainstream media, the backlash was devastating and focused overwhelmingly on the question of employee status. The debate over New York's pending legislation hinged on the question of creating too many new public employees. In fact, the bill would have declared the vast majority of providers as state employees for collective bargaining purposes. Proclamations from other states offer specific disclaimers, but to date, no union has come up with an alternative structure that delinks providers' identity as workers from the concept of employees.

One example of providers organizing outside the union model is a community group in Brooklyn called FUREE (Families United for Racial and Economic Equality). FUREE grew out of efforts by poor women to resist the abuse of New York City's welfare reform. After publicly launching a campaign in 2004, daycare providers won an unprecedented $4.5 million in pay increases from the city's Administration of Children and Families, targeted to the lowest-paid workers in the field. FUREE's director Ilana Berger explains the membership's decision to build its political analysis as a fundamental part of growing the number of people involved and contrasts that with the tradition of most unions. "Organizations that negotiate with politicians but don't develop a politically conscious base can win policy, but can't change the world. We have to build to scale, and we have to build with depth."

Sadly, the space appears to be shrinking for a deeper political vision that non-union labor organizing formations might bring to the field. Providers in Alexandria, Virginia, who won supplemental pay and on-time checks as part of the Tenant and Workers Support Committee, recently decided to phase out their efforts due to a decline in numbers resulting from gentrification of their neighborhoods. And it's not clear what FUREE's future will look like as New York's teacher's union continues its campaign to affiliate 52,000 providers in all five boroughs. In theory, a union with officially sanctioned representation could actually charge the city with an unfair labor practice for discussing issues of compensation with FUREE members. Of course, whether the union's power will be good or bad for providers depends on how well it reflects their values and priorities, and some providers are skeptical. Valerie Morris, a member of FUREE and a provider for the last 14 years, describes past experiences with organizations that made lots of promises but didn't engage the women in changing the balance of power. This left her suspicious of the union's new focus on her industry and wondering, "Why are we so special all of a sudden? How can I trust somebody else to represent me?" Her advice to any organization that would organize with family childcare providers is to "hear us-not just what we say, but the heartfelt things that we don't say. We are people with dreams."

Community organizations have invented their own rules or structures, but they are usually too dependent on the whims of funders to sustain the resources needed to organize on a large scale for a long period of time. Sometimes I catch myself fantasizing that the tremendous financial resources and electoral power of the unions could one day be combined with the organic approaches and deeper political analysis of community organizing models. In Rhode Island, SEIU District 1199 combined their campaign for legislative recognition with leadership of a broad coalition to restore subsidies for parents, showing the potential of the union to organize around the fundamental issue in childcare-the need for public financing. And in Illinois, despite ugly turf wars, SEIU has won raises of up to 35 percent and significant money towards health insurance.

In 1993, Shirley Craig called to tell me that several providers had not received their checks. She told me to draft a flyer and pick her up in 30 minutes. We went to the DHS headquarters and taped bright orange notices on every door declaring the state in violation of their obligation to pay providers on time. That afternoon her phone rang--it was the associate director apologizing profusely and assuring her that checks would be in the mail the next day. I thought of that day at Shirley's funeral in 2004 and finally understood the legacy she left us. She didn't need legal standing or written agreements. We could have all the legislation and executive orders in the world, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference without the absolute claim to dignity that inspired Shirley and her sisters to demand justice by any means they damn well pleased.

Shannah Kurland was an organizer with the Home Daycare Justice Committee of DARE.