Child Care as a Social Justice Issue
From SP Boston
[edit] Child Care as a Social Justice Issue
- 11 April 2008
- Socialist Party Women's Commission
For many women these days, child care is a major issue. As parents, they face formidable, sometimes insurmountable, hurdles trying to find affordable, high-quality care for our young children. As child care workers, they commit themselves to a career characterized by low status, low pay, and insufficient benefits. This should not come as a startling revelation, since an abundance of documentation exists on both these issues. In fact, the solution is also clear: uniting for quality child care means linking affordability and accessibility to the right of child care workers to good wages, benefits, and working conditions; it means expanding the struggle for quality child care to include the quality of the program, the quality of the workplace, and the quality of society as a whole. Demands and action must occur in all these areas if our communities are ever to create and maintain a just, equitable, and compassionate child care system.
Typically, child care advocacy efforts have focused on program quality, according to criteria pertaining to curriculum, teacher-child ratios and interactions, materials, equipment, parent-teacher relationships, and health and safety issues. Countless letters have been written and calls made by members of the child care community to legislators and newspapers calling for major increases in child care funding.
While this approach has brought attention to the needs of young children and their families, the needs of child care workers have been largely ignored. Formal recognition is now routinely given to the critical position of teacher/care givers in the quality-care equation, but somehow their basic right to financial stability, job benefits, and good working conditions never get specifically addressed. Instead, "training" becomes the panacea for the recruitment and retention of good teachers. Apparently, the "compensation" necessary to provide for oneself and a family will magically proceed from further course-work at night or on weekends.
It's time for advocates both within and outside the child care community to fight a whole lot harder for the rights of child care workers if the system as a whole is to improve. A quality workplace is intrinsic to quality child care.
However, the over-riding component of quality child care is the quality of the society we all function in and are impacted by. Policies, programs, and strategies connect directly to visions, values, and priorities. In the U.S., the context for our social, political, and economic behavior is capitalism and militarism. The level of challenge we present to the status quo will determine the degree to which we overcome the injustices we face in our personal and work lives.
This process entails close scrutiny of all the systems-within-a-system, including child care. It requires an ongoing analysis of how and why the various aspects of our society fit together, and the generating of creative solutions. But most of all, it will require energy, daring, and collective action. Deeper bonds need to be created between child care advocates and community activists. Child care issues must be on the activist agenda, and peace and justice issues on the child care agenda. Making connections between our issues will broaden the base of a movement for social change. It will heighten our sense of urgency, and provide allies for our mutual struggle. It will give us resources and support for directing our energy toward attaining our goals.
At the local level, coalitions of workers in child care, education, health care, and the social services will need to take to the street as well as to the halls of the State House to agitate for progressive sources of revenue, such as a steeply graduated state income tax, and high taxes on luxury items. Only in this way, will child care be fully funded, for the sake of families and workers alike.
At the Federal level, child care advocates and community activists will need to work together to redirect national priorities from war to domestic spending. An immediate cut of 50% in the military budget should be our collective demand to politicians at every level of government, since military spending keenly and directly affects state and local programs and services.
Significant changes in the child care situation for children, families, and workers -- a situation that disproportionately affects women, and in particular young women, women of color, and low-income women -- will not be possible without significant change in society as a whole.
By recognizing and demanding our basic rights and interconnected needs -- by bringing child care issues into a broad movement for social, political, and economic justice -- we can vastly improve the lives of working women and of women workers. Ongoing actions, based on our commitment to family and worker rights for all women, are essential to uniting parents, workers, and community members behind quality child care in its most comprehensive and egalitarian sense.