Child care workers’ struggle for recognition and respect intensifies

Ned K.

 

Early this February 2018, the Full Bench of the Fair Work Commission rejected child care workers union’s claim for significant pay rises for the largely female child care workforce.
 

The child care workers union’s claim is really about equal pay for women performing comparable value to work in the more male dominated manufacturing industry.

 

The pay rises sought range from 39% to 72% per week depending on classification level. With a base rate in lower classifications starting at $21 per hour, a 39% wage increase would increase the minimum child care worker hourly rate to $29.20 phased in over time at that.

 

Child care workers union United Voice responded to the Commission Decision by reinforcing their members' decision that hundreds of child care centres would participate in a 'walk off' ' on 27 March this year with support from centre management and thousands of parents whose children use the centres each working day.

 

Child Care Workers Have A Long History Of Struggle

 

The Full Bench had the audacity to say that no evidence was provided to support their case that their wages were comparable to manufacturing workers. The Full Bench is full of itself and that is about all. All it had to do was look at what has happened to wage levels in the services sectors since the enterprise bargaining system came into being in the early 1990s to see how far wages of services sector workers such as child care have fallen behind manufacturing industry wages.

Prior to the enterprise bargaining system, unions were able to 'flow on' wage increases to other industry sectors won in manufacturing awards by creating a dispute through workers in other sectors taking action.

 

After 1993 any gains made by workers through the process of a company-specific or workplace-specific Enterprise Agreement were quarantined in a legal system. The industrial laws brought in by the Hawke/Keating Governments did not allow unions to argue that wage increases won in one workplace should apply to other workplaces even in the same industry, let alone in another sector, such as child care. So workers in a workplace or sector with less "industrial muscle" than a car assembly factory fell further and further behind in wages compared to workers in large production workplaces.

 

Despite this deliberate strategy of the ruling class and their willing helpers in parliament (and in some cases in union leaderships) to de-collectivise the working class through site specific, employer specific enterprise bargaining, child care workers have shown remarkable resilience and determination to surmount all difficulties to win recognition and respect.

 

Their struggle began in the late1980s when in some states, there was not even a child care sector industrial award. Child care workers in some states were paid as "Others" under a private hospitals and ancillary workers award. When the then Miscellaneous Workers Union applied to the Industrial Commission for a specific award for child care workers, employers opposed it while governments who funded the sector were at best neutral observers to the Union's claim.

 

Child care workers took to the streets in support of their demand for their own sector award. It was their collective activity and increasing demand for child care services in the community that resulted in the Commission reflecting this in its Decision to approve a distinct Child Care Workers Award.

 

Through more protracted struggle, child care workers then won improvements in the 1990s to the classification structure in the newly formed Award. In the early 2000s they campaigned and won improvements in staff-to-children ratios which also took in to account the different needs of children of different age groups within the child care centres.

 

These wins occurred in a political environment where both major parties supported to one degree or another reduced public funded community-based child care and an increase in the private for-profit child care sector. The private for-profit child care sector actively opposed child care workers union’s claims for better wages and for recognition that child care workers were not just "child minders" but workers who provided a critical role in early childhood education. The privatisation of a significant part of the sector proved to be a disaster with "get rich quick' operators like Eddie Groves who started and then crashed the ABC Care Centre chain, siphoning off money from parents, workers and the taxpayers.

 

In the Howard Government years of Work Choices, child care workers in the better organised community-based centres defended as best they could their existing wage levels and conditions through template consent Enterprise Agreements, while private for-profit child care centres sought to utilise the stripped back awards and Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs -individual contracts) to lower wages and increase profits.

 

 

Despite these attacks on union members wages and conditions, child care workers union numbers remained much higher than in other private sector industries.

 

When the ALP won the federal election in 2007 and individual contracts in the form of the AWAs became unlawful, child care workers intensified their demands for more government funding of child care for “professional rates" . The workers held many rallies and delegations to parliament house in Canberra to win support from the ALP for sufficient funding for pay increases that reflected child care workers’ worth and socially important role in providing a strong educational foundation for children in the early stages of development.
However, the financial "pie" of the ALP government was declining due to its unwillingness to mobilise the people and take on the big end of town, particularly the mining companies and the financial institutions, most of them foreign owned or foreign owned connected.
The ALP government decided that it would give more money of the shrinking pie to the deregulated disabilities sector though their NDIS rather than child care. The increased finances allocated to child care workers required them to negotiate new Enterprise Agreements on an employer by employer basis.

 

Time ran out and so did the finances when the more reactionary Abbott Government came to office in 2013.

 

Faced with a government openly hostile to both workers and their unions, child care workers and their unions decided to adopt a two-pronged strategy. The workers agreed that they needed to intensify collective action on the job around the demand for professional rates of pay. They also agreed that they needed to win support from both managements of the centres and parents that the child care sector needed a well-trained, stable workforce and that this would only occur if the federal government funded professional rates from general revenue, not from increasing child care fees.

 

Child care workers also agreed to participate as required in the legal application in the Fair Work Commission for wage increases based on equality with male dominated industries such as manufacturing.

 

Lost: The Latest Legal Battle But Not The Class War

 

While child care workers have lost the latest legal battle under the anti-worker Fair Work Act, they have not lost the class war. The class war will intensify with thousands of child care workers walking off the job on 27 March in centres across every State and Territory.
This day of action will be an example of workers uniting with their allies (centre managers and parents) to take effective action through centre closures which cannot be determined as "unprotected action" under the horrid Fair Work Act.

 

Prior to the 27 March, the reactionary Turnbull Government may try to pressure child care centre managers and owners to back down and not close their centres on the day. This will only raise the ire of child care workers even more and further isolate the government which would rather spend money contributing to the US war machine than contributing to the development of a stable, well-paid, well-trained child care workforce for the country’s future - its children.

Boom for childcare operator

Vanguard September 2014 p. 6
Duncan B.




G8 Education is Australia’s largest for-profit childcare company.

In an industry where 84% of child care operators own only one centre, G8 currently owns 361 centres in Australia and 55 in Singapore. G8 has 78 more centres awaiting settlement in Australia, which will give it 439 Australian childcare centres.

G8 announced a purchase of 25 centres in early August, following on from the 115 it bought in the first half of 2014, and the 76 purchased in 2013. G8 is still on the look-out for more acquisitions.

Not surprisingly, G8 announced a 48% rise in interim net profit after tax to $16.3 million, with a 59% rise in revenue to $187.2 million.

It is obvious that the child care industry is a very profitable industry despite the collapse of ABC Learning in 2008. Many parents need to place their children in child care so that they can work.

Another factor underpinning the profitability of childcare centres is that the Federal Government subsidises some of the costs of childcare. Among the Government benefits is the Child Care Rebate which pays up to $7500 per child towards eligible child care. Parents still face high childcare costs, even after the Government subsidies.

Australian parents need access to low cost child care in not-for-profit centres, run to benefit the parents, not companies like G8.

Child care workers show the way forward is through united struggle

Vanguard September 2014 p. 6
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 21^st 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.