By LILLIAN ROBERTS
Executive Director
District Council 37, AFSCME

As I watched the children perform “The Peanut Butter Song” Sept. 19 at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Bellevue Hospital Day Care Center, I reflected back on my days as a young hospital worker.

Life was difficult, especially for the working parents among us, because hospital workers have to care for the ill and injured around the clock. We needed a union, and I led the drive to organize, but in those days our battles were for the basics — wages, working conditions and job security.

Today, DC 37 has made the vital need for day care a high priority, and we have been achieving success for our members. The day care center that recently opened at Bellevue Hospital is a magnificent accomplishment for working parents (see 'Daycare at Bellevue'). What better way to lighten the load for our members than to provide a quality, affordable, and safe day-care center right on the premises of one of the city’s public hospitals?

The new center is a tribute to 20 years of dedicated hard work by its planners, a model for cooperation among the union, management and the community, and a guide to what can be done throughout the Health and Hospitals Corp. and hopefully, even elsewhere in city government.

This is not a wild-eyed dream: We know it can be done.

Local 1549 2nd Vice President Ralph Palladino has been part of the process at Bellevue since the beginning. As he pointed out at the opening ceremony, during World War II, when the country depended on women’s labor power in its factories and shipyards, the national government funded child-care centers for working mothers.

And we know that the European industrial democracies, such as France, Sweden and Germany, dedicate substantial resources towards providing day care to aid their citizens who do the hard work of nurturing the next generation.

These examples show us that where there’s a will, there’s a way.

In the United States, the demand for child-care services has grown tremendously since WW II. Women have joined the workforce in ever-greater numbers, and the family has changed configuration, with many more single-parent families struggling to survive. Even in two-parent families, the high cost of day care imposes a huge burden on budgets that are already strained too tight.

Yet the government’s response at every level has been minimal. Ever since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, every effort to get broad scale federal support for child-care programs has been voted down. Some right-wing Republicans regard financial support for working families as an attack on their ideal of the nuclear family. Many want to keep women out of the job market. And others are just plain cheap.

In the last few years, working in coalition with other unions, we’ve won state funds for demonstration projects that provide child-care subsidies averaging $5,000 a year for 2,600 union families, including about 800 DC 37 children.

But this year, the governor blocked the money and we only kept the project alive by joining a statewide lobbying effort that secured surplus funds from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program for day-care services.

Our example to the nation
Our ultimate goal is for safe, clean, affordable day care to be available for every working family that needs it. The shining example at Bellevue Hospital can only help build support for this principle citywide and on the national level.

Working with the mayor, the City Council and the communities of our city, using the Bellevue Center as a template, we can put together the support and resources to establish similar facilities. We have already made a good start toward establishing a similar center at Elmhurst Hospital. Together, we can make more on-site child-care centers a reality that improves the lives of thousands of members and shows the way for New York City.

The economic disaster that is George W. Bush’s budget (see 'Bushonomics: the cost of war') will make nationwide progress much harder, because we are squandering billions of dollars on a senseless war — dollars that should be used for health care, education, housing and, yes, day care. Progress will depend on changing the faces in Congress and the White House. That’s why I am reminding every member to vote Nov. 7, and if you can, phone our Political Action Dept. at 212-815-1550 to volunteer to help get out the vote.