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Pennsylvania Child Care Workers Unite for a Voice at Work |
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No trick, all treat, for more than 3,700 home-based child care workers across Pennsylvania who voted to join a union yesterday. By a whopping 96 percent to 4 percent margin, the workers became members of Child Care Providers UNITED (CCP UNITED), a joint venture affiliated with both AFSCME and SEIU.
The vote for the new union caps a decades-long effort by teachers and aides to create a union that fits the field of early childhood education and provides quality education for children, as well as better jobs and careers for educators.
Stephen Herzenberg, executive director of the Keystone Research Center (KRC) in Harrisburg, says:
It is actually a triple victory. It’s a win for the children and families that depend on quality early childhood education, which will now get a better shot at the resources necessary to keep high-quality providers in the field. It’s a win for family providers, who’ll have a united voice for family-sustaining pay and benefits. And it’s a win for all of Pennsylvania because research shows that each dollar invested in high-quality early childhood education returns as much as $10 back long term.
KRC is an independent, nonpartisan think tank that has championed the creation of innovative child care unions. Herzenberg says the lessons learned in creating CCP UNITED could help rebuild the union movement.
By modeling how a new union spanning many workplaces can improve jobs, raise skills, and elevate quality, Pennsylvania’s child-care union has the potential to point the way to a broader revival of unions. By helping workers in many industries become more skilled and productive, such a union revival could strengthen the economy as well as the middle class.
In other organizing news, nearly 160 employees of Maplewood Nursing Home in Cheshire County, N.H., who work hard every day to provide the best quality care to the home’s residents, voted overwhelmingly to join AFSCME Council 93.
Roger Lesmerises, a physical therapy aide who was elected to serve as the local’s first president, said favoritism, inadequate health care benefits and terminations turned what had once been a pleasant working environment into one
where people were thoroughly disgusted. We wanted to have a voice on the job.
The new local’s members include licensed nursing assistants, medical nursing assistants, ward aides, laundry and dietary aides, occupational and physical therapy assistants, central supply clerks, receptionists and others.
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When AFSCME and SEIU work together we see the future of our movement, ending turf battles through talks. Applying energies fron street to executive office levels, and improving both unions by increasing theri diversity of memberrship.