The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and its core partners are moving forward on an ambitious campaign to advocate for large-scale investment in childcare and early education. This agenda has twin goals: providing access, affordability, and quality care to working parents, while ensuring stable, living-wage jobs for workers.

Rooted in state and municipal campaigns, and linked together at the national level with the Center for Community Change, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the campaigns seek to create a steady drum beat while organizing bases of parents, workers, and providers pushing for greater investment in childcare across the nation.

Childcare has emerged as a core issue within the fight for economic justice, reflecting the urgency of the issue for both working parents and workers in the industry. As wages stagnate, low-wage sectors boom and workers’ schedules shift unpredictably. Low-wage workers face stark challenges: poverty wages, poor conditions, little or no benefits, and a lack of job security. Of the approximately 1.3 million workers in the childcare workforce, 95 percent are women and 34 percent are people of color. Childcare workers, including those in informal settings, make poverty wages—approximately $9.38 per hour, or $19,510 per year. 

One model for change was born from the work of CPD core partner Organizing in the Land of Enchantment who, together with AFT, have built a broad coalition of parents, workers, and providers under the banner “People for the Kids (P4K).” On February 10, P4K organized the 1,000 Kid March and mobilized educators, parents, community organizers, union leaders, and legislators in New Mexico to pressure Governor Susana Martinez and the legislature to fund an expansion of the childcare system. The state currently ranks 49th in the nation in child well-being, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual Kids Count report. 

To learn more about our workers rights campaigns and other economic justice initiatives, visit the Issues page of our website.