Care providers seek united voice

OLYMPIA – With state child care subsidies well below the actual cost of caring for enrolled kids, some Spokane-area workers and lawmakers say it’s time to give the industry more clout.

How? By unionizing child care workers and letting them bargain with Olympia for higher rates, paid training and other improvements.

“In this environment, you have to be able to provide some leverage for us to act on a priority,” said state Sen. Chris Marr, D-Spokane. He said the normal state budget process, essentially a tug-of-war among lawmakers and interest groups, has let child care rates lag well behind costs. “We’ve let that model work for a long time,” Marr said. “The fact is that it doesn’t work.”

“It’s basically to give us a voice,” said Marci McLaughlin, owner of a Spokane Valley child care center.

The union structure would be unusual, McLaughlin said, with workers and child care owners teaming up to bargain with the state. Under the plan, the state would deduct a yet-to-be-determined “representation fee” from payments to child care centers and pay it directly to the union.

Other lawmakers and child care centers say the simplest fix is just to increase the rates.

“If we really want to get money to child care centers, let’s get it to them,” said state Sen. Brian Hatfield, D-Raymond. He’s backing a bill, Senate Bill 5506, that would boost rates to 75 percent of actual cost.

That plan “bypasses a very expensive and unnecessary middleman,” said Tom Emery, a Puyallup child care center owner. He’s the spokesman for the Washington Child Care Alliance, which includes dozens of centers opposed to the collective bargaining plan.

Lawmakers debated the collective bargaining plan last year, but the bill died in the Senate. The new version would exempt religious child care centers and those with fewer than four state-subsidized kids. It would also exempt centers run by large chains, government agencies or tribes.

Some lawmakers remain unhappy with the proposal.

“It still has employers cover the workers’ union dues, still has directors and workers in the same bargaining unit, and it still sounds a lot like a path toward mandatory unionization,” said Sen. Janea Holmquist, R-Moses Lake.

This year, the odds for the plan look better.

Marr’s Senate Bill 5572 is co-sponsored by 18 other senators, including five Republicans. A similar House version has more than 30 backers, including Reps. Timm Ormsby and Alex Wood, both D-Spokane.

Also backing the plan: teachers unions and the Service Employees International Union, which has organized other low-paid workers who rely on state funding. In recent years, lawmakers have granted collective bargaining rights to home health care workers, adult family homes and family child care providers.

Marr argues that child care is too important to be left to the whims of state budget writers every other year, providing a valuable chance to develop young children’s minds. But that, he said, takes a steady, well-trained work force.

Both sides agree that something must change.

Emery said the state pays less than $11 a day for before- and after-school care. “That covers about half of what it costs us to staff for that,” including vans to take the kids to and from school, he said. “That’s a tough pill to swallow.”

In Spokane, child care centers are paid far less than 75 percent of actual cost.

The state pays $28.53 a day to care for an infant. At 75 percent of actual cost – still a loss – that rate would rise to $33.08, according to the state’s Children’s Administration. The gap is similar for toddlers, preschoolers and school-age kids.

“If things stay the way that they are, you may run into a lot of centers going out of business,” said Leanna Law, who owns a child care center in Nine Mile Falls. With 45 percent of her kids state-subsidized, she said, she can’t afford to hire staff with education degrees or pay for them to get more training. She supports collective bargaining, saying it would give the centers and their workers badly needed clout with legislative budget writers.

Emery says the state dollars that would pay the union representation fee would be better spent directly on child care rates. He also argues that the plan will make centers more leery of accepting state-paid kids because they won’t want to be included in the collective bargaining.

Hatfield agreed. “Even if it’s well-intended, one more mandate on them is going to cause more fear and more red tape,” he said, and make it harder to find spots for kids.