Public Employee Press

Unions hit Bloomberg's child-care cuts

By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

Municipal labor unions stood united at an April rally to urge the City Council to guarantee funding for the city's public day-care centers while calling for the scrapping of EarlyLearn NYC, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's failed experiment that undermines the jobs of DC 1707 members and the safe, top-quality child care they provide.

"We are pleading for our children, our greatest resource," said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, Municipal and County Employees, the parent union of district councils 37 and 1707. "Investing in them is far better than investing in jails. Some, including Bloomberg, just don't get it."

Union leaders criticized the Bloomberg administration's EarlyLearn NYC program for its systematic zip code discrimination, elimination of dozens of public day-care centers and exclusion of new vendors from obtaining Dept. of Health certification to open new centers.

This year 10,000 toddlers in New York City were denied subsidized child care - an essential service for working parents and the city's economy. Bloomberg aims to close 60 public day-care centers and eliminate another 3,000 child-care slots while contracting out services to private and non-profit providers.

Based on what he described as a "longstanding contract of trust between parents and workers," DC 1707 Executive Director Raglan George noted that union members have provided quality care and education for millions of working- and middle-class children in New York City since the 1960s. Since October 2012, George has carried out a "one-man march" outside City Hall to protest the administration's child-care policies.

A cadre of politicians - including City Council members Gale Brewer, Sara M. Gonzalez, Letitia James, and Robert Jackson, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, and City Comptroller John Liu - joined state AFL-CIO head Mario Cilento, New York City Central Labor Council chair Vincent Alvarez, Council 1707's Executive Director George and President Kim Medina as well as DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts, dozens of DC 37 local presidents and activists, parents and youngsters who attended labor's pushback rally against what organizers called the mayor's "anti-child, anti-working parent policies."

Labor leaders look to City Council to do what the mayor won't - provide guaranteed annual baseline funding to support public day care.

"Our next mayor must commit to investing in our children, in public day-care centers and schools and in public employees," Roberts said.

"Every spring in the richest city in the richest country, we return and have to plead for funding," Saunders said. "This devalues workers and shows a lack of respect for nurturers of children. Bloomberg needs to show that kids come first!"

"This attack on our children and poor and working families is contemptible," George said. The June budget deal for next year restored thousands of places for child care and after-school care that would have been closed under Bloomberg's proposed budget.