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SEIU 925 is nearly 20,000 union members, united across education and public service. We are school bus drivers, child care providers, healthcare professionals, public defenders, paraeducators, custodians, administrative support personnel, and more. In our industries, we care for children, students, and patients, yet too many of us struggle to support our own families. One thing is clear and has been learned from painful experiences a decade ago – cutting essential services is deeply damaging to our state economy, and prolongs economic slowdowns. Cutting services means taking money out of local economies and throwing working and low income families into instability. Instead, we should defend essential services and ask all Washingtonians, including the wealthy few and large corporations to pay what they owe.
SEIU members call on our new Governor and Legislature to:
⭐ Fulfill the promise of Fair Start for Kids
2021’s Fair Start for Kids Act was a historic investment in child care. More families got help with the cost of care, while rates for providers increased. But the work is not done. Today, a family of four earning $86,000 a year makes too much to get any help for care, and average costs on the open market can be 20-30% of their income. Meanwhile, child care providers earn poverty wages and a majority rely on public aid, with workforce recruitment and retention continuing to be a challenge. Under Fair Start for Kids, family eligibility increases to 75% of State Median Income ($91,224 for a family of four) and rates are adjusted to the most recent Market Rate Survey. These maintenance level budget items are critical for continuing to improve Washington’s child care system.
⭐ Establish the Child Care Workforce Standards Board
With over 6,000 licensed facilities, child care in Washington is a diffuse workforce where organizing and collective bargaining one facility at a time makes it difficult to raise industry standards. Worker standards boards are a tool that many states, including Minnesota, Colorado, California, and New Jersey use to help improve working conditions and standards and empower workers. The Child Care Workforce Standards Board would include childcare providers, employers and community members who rely on child care. It will work with LNI and DCYF to set standards for child care providers in our state. This approach allows us to discuss things like wages and benefits, safety, and professional development and craft holistic solutions that support child care providers, workers, and the communities they serve. This is a last-mile tool that ensures public funding for child care programs makes it into workers’ pockets.
⭐ Transition to the Cost of Quality rate model
Child care in Washington is a broken market – families can’t afford to pay, and providers can’t afford to live on a low salary. This conundrum is exacerbated by using the Market Rate Survey to set subsidy rates, which measures what providers charge, rather than what it costs to provide care. Fair Start for Kids directed DCYF to develop a Cost of Quality model, which has been developed in collaboration with providers and responsive to the diverse settings that care is provided in. The Legislature should adopt the Cost of Quality Care as our state’s subsidy rate setting tool.
⭐ Fund Competitive Wages for Education Support Professionals
Thriving schools for Washington’s students are only possible when all school staff positions, from bus drivers, and custodians to nutrition services and paraeducators are adequately funded. Chronic shortages and constant turnover in these critical roles are symptoms of low pay resulting from lack of state funding.No education professional should earn wages that qualify their families for free or reduced-price lunches or other social safety net programs. The Legislature must fund additional classified staff positions and increase compensation for the lowest paid staff in schools.
⭐ Ensure workers have a voice as AI becomes more widespread in our jobs Generative AI has the potential to dramatically change our workplaces, and like other changes, workers should have a voice. Unfortunately, too many public employers in the last year have balked at bargaining the impacts. Legislators should clarify that generative AI is not simply a new piece of software, and should allow the implementation of generative AI at the workplace to be subject to union bargaining.
⭐ Raise progressive revenue to fund state priorities
In order to fulfill the promise of Fair Start for Kids, raising wages for child care providers and education support professionals will require new progressive state revenue. SEIU 925 calls on the Legislature to take bold steps to fund these important programs in our state: our members will back you up!