Worthy Wages in the Emerald City: Worker- and Director-Led Childcare Movements in Seattle, 1984–2006

We have wiped ten thousand bottoms, we have dried ten thousand tears.We have served ten thousand crackers, we have calmed ten thousand fears.We don't want to be impoverished for the next ten thousand years.We deserve a worthy wage.On a rainy Thursday in April 1991, a crowd of 1,800 daycare workers and childcare advocates donned boots and umbrellas and took to the streets of Seattle to demand better pay for the city's daycare workers. Bosses—themselves poorly paid center directors—organized with workers to shut down seventy-five daycare centers for all or part of the day. Parents and children joined the “parade,” as did the city's mayor, Norman Rice.1 Seattle's 1991 “Worthy Wages Day” brought national attention to the issue of childcare's “hidden subsidy” and sparked a vibrant campaign that continued throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century.2While Seattle became the epicenter of the movement, Worthy Wage chapters emerged in over thirty states, Canada, and Washington, DC (fig. 1).3 The Worthy Wage movement brought to a boil a childcare labor crisis that had been simmering for decades. As maternal labor force participation grew dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century, increasing from approximately 20 percent of married women with children in the workforce in 1950 to approximately 70 percent in 1995, a low-wage childcare workforce expanded rapidly as well.4Seattle produced the most active childcare labor movement in the United States, but it also typified the themes and dynamics of childcare employee activism in many other cities at the turn of the twenty-first century. The movements in Seattle showcase the challenges of improving the social and economic value of childcare work, particularly in the contexts of retrenchment and privatization.The childcare labor movement in Seattle proceeded through three stages: an advocacy stage, a union stage focused on center-based workers, and a union stage focused on home-based providers. During the first stage, grassroots Worthy Wage activists built a cooperative public education campaign. Daycare center directors and workers collaborated to inform the public of undercompensation in childcare with the goal of pressuring policymakers to improve childcare funding. In 1998, the Worthy Wage Task Force affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) District 925 to form the Child Care Union Project, an effort focused on organizing center-based workers. Wishing to respect workers’ desire to maintain cooperative relationships with directors, and acknowledging that most centers had limited room in their budgets to increase wages, SEIU bet that they could improve wages by exerting their power in Washington State to expand state funding for childcare. When this strategy failed, they shifted gears toward organizing home-based family childcare providers. Building on the work of Local 880 in Illinois, SEIU found that family childcare providers, many of whom served clients with childcare subsidies, had a more direct relationship with public funding. They established an employment relationship that allowed providers to bargain directly with the state of Washington.Examining these three stages concurrently offers several insights into the history of labor organizing in the childcare field, with broader implications for our understanding of labor struggles in the small, often home-based “shops” of care work.First, daycare organizing was typified by a cooperative rather than an antagonistic approach—between workers and center directors and workers and families. Second, organizers found that this cooperative approach to labor activism was more effective in segments of the industry where larger portions of funding came from government sources. Funding mechanisms proved more important than the spatial status of the worksite (home versus center) in determining the relative successes of labor campaigns. The wins of family childcare workers, in comparison with center-based daycare workers, surprised those who believed sharing a worksite was critical to building a union. The history of childcare worker organizing in the 1990s shows how, amid neoliberal social policy, labor activists successfully responded to the exploitation of waged care workers by harnessing, to workers’ advantage, the solubility of divisions between workplace/home, employer/employee, and labor/love.In the decades before the Seattle campaign, childcare had become an industry. Between 1967 and 1990, the number of childcare centers tripled nationwide, and the number of children served quadrupled.5 The industry encompassed a patchwork of options, to which parents had varying degrees of access. While relatively affluent families could hire private household providers (nannies and au pairs), daycare centers and family childcare homes offered a more affordable option to a wider range of families. 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