Public Employee Press

Children’s needs low on national agenda
Child care: Missing In Action

By JANE LaTOUR

As the costs and casualties of the war in Iraq continue to climb, other national priorities barely survive on starvation budgets.

There is a huge gap between available funding and the immense need for safe, affordable child care.

“This is the time when we need to expand day care,” said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts. “We need 24/7 day care in every borough to meet the needs of city workers and all working families. The war in Iraq is squandering money that is vitally needed for child care and other human needs and public services,” she said.

Along with health care for the nation’s uninsured children, day care has been added to the growing list of needs ignored as President Bush constantly seeks more ­money for the war and the U.S. Congress goes along.

Day care has been out of the ­national limelight for decades. In 1990, Bush’s father, President George H. W. Bush, signed a watered-down child-care bill. Far from a comprehensive plan, this turned out to be “a hodgepodge of tax credits, vouchers and block grants to states,” which “relaxed quality standards for child care and appropriated little money,” wrote Tanya Melichin “The Republican War Against Women.”

Family support missing
In the United States, child care is still largely seen as a private issue. Other industrialized countries ­recognize that women are a permanent part of the work force and take a different ­approach, including paid ­maternity leaves and public preschools.

As author Ann Crittenden described, “Swedish women enjoy benefits that American women can only imagine in their wildest dreams: a year’s paid leave after childbirth, the right to work a six-hour day with full benefits until the child is in primary school, and a stipend from the government to help pay child-care expenses.”

While providing such support for families might appear utopian, such policies actually make sense. A 2004 national conference sponsored by the Workplace Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Legal Momentum’s Family Initiative concluded that quality child care and early education benefit society and provide long-term savings to taxpayers.

The Family Initiative educates and mobilizes women to press for affordable quality child care, preschool and after school, for every family that chooses them. Until then, working people will continue to make agonizing choices about child care by themselves and with help from activist unions like DC37. For information on these issues, go to www.familyinitiative.org.

As long as the war in Iraq continues to drain the national treasury, it will be difficult to move issues like subsidized child care and universal preschool higher on the list of national priorities.

Here in New York, DC 37 and the New York Union Child Care Coalition have obtained state and city funds for hundreds of subsidized day-care slots in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan.

However, the funding to provide subsidies for families in Queens through the Child Care Facilitated Enrollment Project announced in the June PEP has been delayed, and shortfalls in the budgets for other boroughs continue to plague the program.

“Perhaps we can win the funding for Queens next year,” said Moira Dolan of the DC 37 Research and Negotiations Dept. “In the meantime, we are calling families and referring them to other centers through the city’s child-care program. “A lot of them are eligible under the city’s income guidelines,” said Dolan.

How many more child-care slots could we provide with the funds being spent on the war that still bleeds our budgets and the bodies of our young men and women? The chart above provides a partial answer to that question.