Hundreds join child care borough committees

Feb 16, 2006 2:39 PM

Hundreds of family child-care providers attended meetings in January organized by the UFT and the community organization ACORN to spread the word about the union organizing drive and to urge more people to get involved. A couple of hundred providers signed up to join new borough leadership committees at the meetings in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and northern Manhattan. The union has collected authorization cards from 6,000 providers and is lobbying Albany to give family child-care providers the right to form a union. UFT Special Representative Amina Rachman said she points out at each meeting how providers are educators, too. “I tell them, ‘We at the UFT are teachers and we know other teachers when we see them,’” she said. “The crowd goes crazy. They love that.” Each session includes time for the providers to speak about their problems. “We hear the nightmare stories about thousands of dollars owed in back pay and problems with rude license inspectors making arbitrary decisions. It all comes up,” said Fran Streich, the UFT’s home day-care project director.

Rachman addresses the more than 500 Manhattan and Bronx providers who attended the Jan. 26 gathering at Bread and Roses HS in West Harlem.