Child care workers show the way forward is through united struggle

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by Ned K.

Early childhood education workers, commonly known as child care workers, are waging a protracted struggle for respect, recognition and better pay.

Their struggle began in the late 1980’s when there was even recognition of this sector as warranting their own industrial award to regulate wages and conditions.

Through the early 1990s they won an industrial award recognising their existence as a community of workers in their own right. This first step was won by a combination of community based action by workers and supportive parents and an industrial and legal strategy by their union, Miscellaneous Workers Union (now United Voice).

In the first decade of the 21st Century they took another step forward by campaigning for better child to worker ratios to enable quality standards of care and education for children.

With the election of a Labor Rudd Government in 2007, they hoped for a government more receptive to the need to attract and keep more formally trained workers in the sector. They launched a campaign for professional rates in the industry and for greater government funding of the sector in order to pay for the professional rates.

In the last term of the Gillard- Rudd Government, an extra $300 million dollars was allocated to the sector, specifically for wages of workers who won collective union agreements with their centre owners. The $300 million was nowhere near the $1.4 billion or so a year that workers were campaigning for to enable all child care workers to be paid decent rates for delivering high quality care.

The $300 million was nevertheless a significant step forward and it only came about because of the mass mobilisation of child care workers and community supporters who took to the streets in their thousands to make the politicians listen.

Why did the government hear them, but only allocate $300 million as a one off amount?  If the government had held its nerve on the mining and resource tax and built on this as a way of returning some of the profits of the mining magnates to the Australian people, the story may have been different.

When the Abbott Government won the spoils of office in Canberra it cancelled any funding for workers’ wage increases and under the smokescreen of the Productivity Commission set sail on a course to smash long day child care centres and the child care workers’ campaign.

The Abbott government champions itself the government of ‘flexibility’ in the delivery of children’s services at affordable prices for parents. However its real aim is to develop a two tier system of care at a cheap price for the rich through dismantling many of the long day child care centres and replacing them with poorly trained poorly paid home based care (nannies).

Despite the current situation and the protracted nature of their struggle, the child care sector is one of the few sectors where union membership has increased dramatically. In some states from the end of the Howard years, through the Labor years to the present all-out attack on these workers under the present government, child care workers have increased their ranks measured by union membership by over 100%, and in some cases by about 200%.

Leading by example
Central to this achievement and show of determination has been the role of women workers in centres prepared to stand up by becoming their union delegate and campaign leader.

In some states these women leaders have continued to meet and plan their next steps on a monthly basis over a period of 25 years, a remarkable achievement and example to other workers.

Child care workers have also learned to unite all workers in their centres -  the teacher trained, the Certificate 3 trained, the untrained, the kitchen staff and importantly the centre directors who often wear two hats, one as another centre worker and the other as co-ordinator/supervisor.

The gains made by these workers and their determination to see the struggle through to the end to win professional rates is an inspiration to all workers in the services sector of the economy of capitalism.

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