Local 99 Members Make Their Voices Heard to Urge Legislators to Fund Child Care and Education
At about 6:30 p.m. on April 17, the large tour buses started lining up outside SEIU Local 99—buses headed to Sacramento that would be pulling out around midnight filled with child care providers, school janitors, cafeteria workers, community college employees, Head Start teachers, and others in the field of education and early care.
Our mission: to tell Sacramento to stop the cuts that hurt our kids and families.
Nineteen child care providers joined that trip to make sure legislators heard from us. After arriving early Wednesday morning, we received some lobby training, marched and chanted on our way to the capital, and started showing up at legislators’ offices.
Together, Local 99 members visited 39 legislators. We told them about our commitment to children and our struggles with California’s broken child care system. We asked them to stop the cuts to child care and to oppose the “realignment” of the guaranteed funding that would shift child care services from state oversight to counties, a change that does not guarantee that money allocated for child care will be spent on child care.
Special Hearing on Child Care
While we were in Sacramento, we packed the Labor Subcommittee hearing room with a sea of purple to show support for our Child Care Organizing bill (AB 2573 now, AB101 last year). Although we don’t expect it to get signed until after the Governor’s “Millionaire Tax” initiative passes in the fall, we must continue to speak up in 2012. We need legislators to know we’re not “going away” and we have to make sure they’re ready to take action next year to finally give providers a voice. The good news: our bill passed in the Labor subcommittee.
It was great to have some Local 99 members who work at LAUSD join us at the hearing. They were in between lobby visits and came to show their support.
Legislators came to us!
At the end of our day, legislators went out of their way to come to a special reception to meet us and wish us well on our trip home. They emphasized their commitment to quality schools and the employees who provide that quality: US! SEIU Local 99 members are making politics work for our schools!
We are the 99%!
During our “Midnight Ride” Kick-Off Rally Tuesday night, we shined some light on one of the main reasons we don’t have enough money for quality child care and good schools: the rich “1%” aren’t paying their fair share and hugely profitable corporations raking in tens of billions of dollars are paying ZERO in taxes. We held a “Tax Revolt Carnival” after our press conference. The rally was covered by ABC 7, Univision, Telemundo, and several other local news stations.
Watch the coverage!
What’s next?
We took this trip in anticipation of Governor Brown’s “May Revise” of his budget proposal. Each year, the Governor adjusts his budget after he learns how much money the state received in income taxes. We wanted to make sure he heard from us before releasing this revised budget.
Take action!
…and we want to make sure the Governor keeps on hearing from us. If you haven’t already, be sure to call him at 1-866-873-0560 or email the Governor to let him know what the cuts mean to the children and families you serve!
“It’s important to visit legislators so they can hear our concerns and issues about our broken system. I’m here to make a difference.”
Olga Angelo, a Provider in Montclair
