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
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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