[“An adequate child program must be made available to every
child of working mothers, regardless of race, creed or color.” ]
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UE FOUGHT FOR CHILD CARE AS “INFRASTRUCTURE” AS FAR BACK AS WWII
 
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United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of American (UE)
May 9, 2021
United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of American (UE)
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_ “An adequate child program must be made available to every child
of working mothers, regardless of race, creed or color.” _

The UE NEWS covers the child care program issued in 1943 by the
CIO’s Congress of Women’s Auxiliaries, UE News Archives

 

In their attacks on President Biden’s much-needed proposals to
invest in physical and human infrastructure, the American Jobs Plan
and the American Families Plan, many Republican politicians have
derided applying the term “infrastructure” to programs that
support working families. They dismiss child care, elder care and paid
family leave as “liberal social programs” as opposed to the
“real infrastructure” of buildings, roads, and bridges.

The experience of UE members during World War II, when millions of
women took jobs in manufacturing, tells a different story. Pushed by
UE and other CIO unions, Congress included funding for child care
centers in the “Defense Public Works law of 1941,” or Lanham Act.
Pressing Congress to maintain this funding was one of the key
priorities for UE political action throughout the early 1940s.

KATHERINE BEECHER, the education director of the UE Women’s
Auxiliary, made the explicit connection between availability of child
care and the ability of women war workers to do their jobs in a 1944
UE NEWS article entitled “Give Them A Chance to Do Their Jobs
Right!”

Before they went to work in a war plant, most women already had
full-time jobs—taking care of homes and children. Once in a war
plant they had two jobs, and signs are increasing daily that after the
super-human efforts of many women to do both jobs well, they just
can't keep going without plenty of outside help.

The lack of that outside help, Beecher wrote, was hurting the war
effort. “At the very time when the demand for women workers is
increasing in manpower shortage areas, women are leaving in larger
numbers than they are being recruited,” and “the paramount problem
is child care.”

BILLIE ROGERS, a GE worker who represented UE Local 301 at a 1944 New
York State Conference of Women Workers, told the UE NEWS that in a
questionnaire distributed to all GE women “We found that child care
was a very vital matter. It is well known that we need care for
children while the mothers work. The answers to the questionnaire
proved that we were right.”

In 1943, the CIO’s Congress of Women’s Auxiliaries proposed a
wide-ranging program of infant care, nursery care, elementary care,
youth programs and programs to feed children at all child-care
centers. They declared that “We recognize that the care and
protection of our children in wartime is a definite duty and
responsibility of labor, the community and government” and that
“An adequate child program must be made available to every child of
working mothers, regardless of race, creed or color.”

The funds provided by the Lanham Act, along with additional funding
from state and local governments, supported thousands of subsidized
child-care centers throughout the duration of WWII, many of them
established in cooperation with local unions.

UE and other unions fought for continuation of federally-subsidized
child care after the end of the war. But the business counter-attack
which curtailed labor rights, blocked progress towards a universal
healthcare system, and lifted the price controls that had kept basic
necessities affordable for working people during the war, also
eliminated the subsidies for child care.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a resurgent feminist movement once again put
child care on the agenda, arguing that economic dependence on men keep
women from being fully free. Feminists pointed out that child care was
a necessary “infrastructure” to allow women to work outside the
home if they chose. Some also argued that women who chose to do the
work of caring for their own children full-time should receive
“wages for housework.”

Since the 1970s, the overall decline in workers’ wages has made
child care a necessity for the vast majority of working-class
families. Most two-parent families cannot afford _not_ to have both
parents working, and the number of single-parent families has
increased.

The lack of affordable child care is also a drag on the overall
economy. Recent analysis
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of Bureau of Labor Statistics employment numbers by Matt Bruenig of
the People’s Policy Project suggests that lack of affordable child
care is the main driver of the decline in net employment growth in
April.

Senator Bernie Sanders, one of UE’s most reliable allies in
Washington, D.C., has been taking up the struggle for child care and
other “care infrastructure” by pushing hard to include major
investments in healthcare and education in the next major budget bill.
The idea that “infrastructure” includes care work is not limited
to the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, however. In December, the
Trump Administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency deemed
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that child care workers and human service workers should be considered
“essential critical infrastructure workers” (though, notably, did
not encourage paying them hazard pay during the pandemic, or a living
wage).

Anne-Marie Slaughter, of the centrist think tank New America, recently
laid out the argument for considering care as infrastructure in an
op-ed in the New York Times
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in which she proposes that we “take at face value that
infrastructure are those facilities that are essential for everyone to
do their jobs.” She recognizes that “men with wives at home to
take on the 16-hour-a-day care responsibilities involved in raising
children, supporting aged parents or otherwise tending to the sick,
those with disabilities and the vulnerable” might not view their
wives’ unpaid labor as part of the nation’s “infrastructure,”
but continues:

But let’s imagine — it’s not that hard — a scenario in which
those same men didn’t have wives at home and yet still wanted to
have children, or to ensure that their own parents received love and
support in their final years. In that case, they, too, might just find
that care facilities were themselves just as “essential” to their
ability to do paid work.

UE continues to support robust federal investment in our
infrastructure, broadly defined. This must include expanded support
for healthcare, child and elder care, and paid family and sick leave.
Specifically, the resolution “The Battle for Equal Women’s
Rights,” [[link removed]] passed by
rank-and-file delegates at UE’s 2019 convention, calls upon Congress
to “enact a federal paid parental leave program and a high-quality
federal day care program” and to “create a subsidized system which
does not penalize individuals for providing homecare and which
provides a living wage and quality homecare” for those taking care
of elders or family members with disabilities.

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