Big Labor’s child care racket

You probably don’t know that in the last 12 years, the number of child care workers has increased by about 33%, while the number of children ages 5 and under fell by 8.8%. The explosion of the child care industry has persisted even while the number of stay-at-home mothers has risen in recent years.

GRIFTERS AND GRAFTERS

The story here is not just a matter of Somali fraudsters. It’s a much bigger story about special-interest politics boosted by ideology and masquerading as family policy.

For the past two decades, Democrats have been pumping billions of dollars into the child care industry at the behest of labor unions, who then use the state funding as a lever by which to unionize all child-care workers, including the unwilling.

These same unions, in turn, funnel this taxpayer money back to the Democratic politicians.

When you hear a Democratic politician say they want “universal child care,” or campaign on expanding “affordable, high-quality child care,” you should suspect that they are playing patronage politics with the labor union allies.

‘The Minnesota Miracle’

Minnesota’s raft of child care subsidies is just one example, but it’s a telling example.

Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) was reelected in 2022, and his party took control of both legislative chambers — its first “trifecta” in a decade.

The margins were thin, but the party’s ambitions were great. It accomplished almost everything it set out to do. Liberals celebrated this as “the Minnesota Miracle.” The biggest thing they did was expand all sorts of subsidies for child care.

Politicians such as Walz painted this as a win for parents, but it wasn’t parents who crafted these policies and pushed them across the finish line.

Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Jamie Long explained the progressive approach: “You need good ideas. … You need elected politicians who are going to be supporting those ideas, and then you need outside organizing for elections and to support those votes.”

The Washington Post’s EJ Dionne elaborated: “All three are key to getting things done. In Minnesota, key players included unions, environmental groups and faith-based organizers in the appropriately named Isaiah organization. In the run-up to the session, the outside groups were brought into the task of crafting an agenda.”

That is, Democrats let the outside groups, including the unions, craft their child care policies.

It was telling that Democrats did this with a razor-thin majority. Their aggressive actions in 2023 should be understood in part as a strategic effort to build political strength: funnel more money to their political allies, which will help them win in two, four, and eight years.

Building their political power is explicitly the goal of these outside groups. Isaiah, one of the groups Dionne cited, has “Build Power” in its motto. Isaiah’s biggest project is a program called “Kids Count on Us,” which is a lobby effort to boost state subsidies for child care.

This is explicitly a supply-side project more than a demand-side one. As Kids Count on Us describes itself, “Providers, teachers, and parents organizing together.”

This is an industry lobby looking for more federal funds. The organization brags, “We won over $1 Billion in childcare funding in Minnesota.”

One item the industry won: increasing the amount the Child Care Assistance Program will pay to child care providers. Under the new law, the taxpayer would pay these subsidized child care providers well above the average going rate — specifically, equal to the 75th percentile.

In that 2023 session, the groups also lobbied successfully to extend special COVID-19-era direct payments to child care providers. Called the “Great Start Compensation Support Payment Program,” it is “designed to support the child care and early learning industry and workforce,” according to the legislature. It’s a $100-million-a-year subsidy directly to the industry. This money never goes to parents. It just goes to the businesses, and thus to the unions.

In that 2022 cycle, government unions, such as AFSCME and SEIU, spent more than $13 million on Minnesota politics, with almost all of the money going to Democrats.

Washington and California

A similar story has played out in other states.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) in 2019 signed AB 387, which effectively transformed tens of thousands of child care workers into state employees for the purposes of union organizing.

Workers at day cares were covered, as were grandmas who did day care in their homes. Anyone who took in state-subsidized children became a presumed member of the very partisan and hard-left unions SEIU and AFSCME.

While these day care workers would not technically be state employees, the law dictated that their negotiating counterparty would be Newsom.

This bill was crafted and pushed by a child care lobby called Child Care Providers United, a coalition formed by SEIU and AFSCME.

So, taxpayer subsidies were the mechanism by which day care workers became members of SEIU and AFSCME. These unions, which are very liberal and 100% aligned with Democrats, then tapped into these 40,000 workers as an organizing army and a source of funds — both of which were put to work for the Left.

As an added bonus, the unions often pocket money from unwilling child care workers.

“In several states, governments are automatically deducting a portion of Medicaid or other government aid from home healthcare and family childcare (day care) providers’ assistance checks and giving that money to government unions,” the State Policy Network reported. “Many providers are unaware this money is even being taken; others are aware but struggle to stop their state and union from skimming money from their checks; and some caregivers allege the unions and governments are fraudulently skimming the money.”

In Washington state, this little racket started much earlier. Since 2004, SEIU has been the bargaining representative for any licensed childcare provider that receives state money through the “Working Connections Child Care” subsidy. Of course, SEIU is “bargaining” with liberal state politicians who are spending other people’s money, and so it gets a lot of what it wants.

The big picture

In short, Democratic politicians create subsidies for day care for poor parents, the subsidies effectively turn day care providers into members of Democrat-aligned unions, those unions then lobby to expand these subsidies to pay above market rate, and to cover more families.

Meanwhile, most parents do not want formal child care. The Bipartisan Policy Center published a paper in 2022 asking “What Keeps Employed Parents Out of the Childcare System?” The answer: parents don’t want to be in the “childcare system.”

“More than half of parents would still prefer informal child care, even if formal care was free and convenient,” BPC found.

This is the consistent finding of polls and studies in the United States. Most parents would like to simply work less and thus take care of their children, and to the extent they need or want outside help, they would prefer informal, often unpaid child care, such as neighborhood babysitting co-ops or help from grandma.

IF YOU’RE A STAY-AT-HOME-PARENT, BIDEN THINKS YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM

But stay-at-home mothers and informal networks do not pump money into the system that allows the unions to grow and kick money back to politicians.

So if you wonder why Democrats’ only answer, when asked about family policy, is day care subsidies, just follow the money.