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127 Chapter 6 But Who Will Watch the Children? State and Local Campaigns to Improve Child Care Policies1 Sometimes the wages that my clients make don’t allow for child care. And it’s only because of [government support] that it is possible for them to even have child care. If they had to pay for it on their own, they would be right back where they started in welfare-to-work because of the [lack of] child care. . . . If they raised the [child care] fees, more than likely, I would be out of business in the area that I live in. –Child care provider, Los Angeles I haven’t been reimbursed for ninety days for one child and it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon because [of] all the red tape and paperwork and everything. Eventually child care providers are not going to want to bear the burden of subsidized care. . . . We can’t operate ninety days behind on payments, especially when those payments aren’t even going to be at the market rate. What’s the benefit in it for us to not get paid what we deserve and then not get paid in a timely manner? –Child care provider, Los Angeles Refusing to . . . honor and respect and validate unwaged workers means you refuse to recognize the majority of our women on earth. . . . This is mothers who care for their children, the mothers who care for the elders, the mothers who care for the disabled, the mothers who care for the churches, and the mothers who care for the community, the mothers who care for the schools, the mothers who care for the neighborhoods. . . . Our goal is government-guaranteed child support until children are eighteen. –Pat Gowens, founder of Welfare Warriors, Milwaukee2 I N ADDITION to sparking campaigns over workfare workers’ rights, the implementation of new welfare-to-work requirements also gave new life to long-standing struggles over policies that regulated the care of children. This chapter examines three types of struggles over child care policies that ensued in Wisconsin and California in the wake of welfare reform. First, some welfare rights activists defended poor mothers’ right to take care of their children, pushing for various exemptions from welfare -to-work requirements. Second, child care providers and children’s advocates pushed for improvements in child care providers’ rights as workers, such as higher wages and better working conditions as well as their right to influence the development of child care programs through collective bargaining. Finally, providers, low-income families, and other children’s and welfare advocates demanded improvements in the availability of child care services. These three struggles over child care were certainly not the only ones. Other struggles, often involving professional associations and child care officials, focused on improving the quality and regulation of subsidized child care. In this chapter, I focus on these three demands—low-income parents’ rights to provide care for their own children, working parents’ access to affordable child care, and child care providers’ labor rights—because they were the primary demands of base-building organizations that represented low-income parents and child care providers, a group composed mostly of racially and ethnically diverse women. State policies had contradictory impacts on unions’ and community organizations’ efforts to shape child care policies. The emphasis of putting poor mothers to work within welfare reform created major setbacks in terms of poor mothers’ rights to care for their own children at home. As Nancy Naples argues, the “new gendered consensus” on the U.S. welfare state was that poor, able-bodied mothers were unworthy of aid and expected to work.3 Although federal-level work requirements for welfare mothers had been in place since 1967, states were now required to expand participation dramatically in welfare-to-work programs. The “new gendered consensus” discouraged all but a few welfare rights organizations from defending every mother’s right to care for her own children. Instead, most welfare advocacy groups focused on expanding the exemptions from work requirements for particular groups of welfare mothers, such as the mothers of very young or disabled children, building alliances with children’s and disability rights advocates around those demands. These more limited demands met with uneven success as policymakers across states and institutions varied in their views regarding the conditions under which welfare mothers should be exempt from work requirements and whether poor mothers’ obligation to care for their own children sometimes...

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