OUR WORK
Child care and early education are critical pieces of our human infrastructure, and we need to act like it.
Child care is the only way many working parents can balance career success with family responsibilities. It’s especially crucial to bringing women back into the workforce and for California’s economy to fully recover from this pandemic. In our first contract with the state, we began the process of stabilizing the child care industry by securing the first significant pay increases for providers in years. But improving pay is just one way we are working to retain and recruit new providers.
Our contract also set-up Joint Labor Management Committees. They offer a pathway to continue to address health care, retirement, paid-time-off and other issues impacting our livelihoods and parents’ access to quality care. By ensuring that dedicated providers have the same basic benefits and protections as other essential workers, current providers will be able to keep their doors open, more providers will be attracted to the profession and working parents will have more options for quality, affordable care.
Increase Available Child Care by Ensuring Child Care Jobs Are Good Jobs
What We're Asking For
Providers closed their doors by the thousands during the pandemic, hastening a decline in family child care capacity in California, and openings in 2021 have not significantly reversed this trend. In addition to the significant first pay increase won in the CCPU contract set to go into effect January 1, 2022, providers are continuing to demand their jobs be good jobs so that experienced providers will stay in the field and more providers will open. Specifically , CCPU providers are prioritizing the following areas to address:Make Quality Child Care More Affordable
What We're Asking For
All children should have equal opportunity to get the support they need to succeed in school, regardless of race, income, or zip code. Fund more child care vouchers for families, a permanent end to family fees, and more child care capacity statewide. Expand hard-to-find child care for families needing help on weekends and evenings or for children who have special needs, by increasing pay for providers offering these services.
Improve and Streamline How California’s Child Care System Works
What We're Asking For
Improve transparency and communication between the state, local organizations, parents, and providers so that everyone receives the same information regarding state policies. Ensure there are no interruptions in care by eliminating any administrative delays in paying providers.
We share Governor Gavin Newsom’s vision of building a stronger early care and education system and welcome the opportunity to work with his Administration to build on our contract victories in the months ahead through the Labor Management Committee process that CCPU providers and Governor Newsom agreed to in our historic first contract.
CHILD CARE MATTERS
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, child care providers were already essential workers.
They’ve stepped up to care for the kids of front-line workers and filled in the learning gap for school-aged children impacted by distance learning. They’re the bedrock of working families—especially among Black and Latino communities.
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WHO WE ARE
We are Child Care Providers United—
a union of over 40,000 child care providers throughout California working in partnership with parents, early childhood education advocates and our state legislators to fix the state’s child care crisis, improve our profession and the quality of care through policy advocacy, grassroots community organizing, and our collective voice. We are guided by the belief that all children and families should have access to quality early education and care.
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