Child-care bill a new kind of law for the private sector

The child-care bill in the state Senate, House Bill 2449, is an ingenious creation. It places the workers and managers in most private child-care centers in a bargaining group with others in the area.

There will be a vote on union representation, and if a majority of those voting vote yes, the whole group, bosses and workers alike, will be in the union. The union will bargain with the state over payment per child, and will negotiate a fee for itself.

This is a new kind of labor law for the private sector. The old way was that employees negotiated with employers. Here, both will negotiate with the state. If the two sides cannot agree on a contract, an arbitrator will define one, which will go to the Legislature for ratification.

Most of these are rules from public-sector unionism — the type that has thrived in the past 50 years. In Washington state, unions represent 54 percent of workers in the public sector, but only 13 percent in the private sector. Private employers have learned to live without unions. Public employers mostly don't. The genius of this child-care bill, and others like it, is to reclassify private employees as public employees for the purpose of bargaining.

The brains behind this is the Service Employees International Union. The SEIU is the fastest-growing union in America and the most politically active in Washington. Its sympathies are Democrat, its acts opportunistic. In the 2004 primary, it spent big money to knock out Seattle Democrat Helen Sommers, chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee. Sommers had blocked an SEIU contract. She survived, but barely — and the union sent an unmistakable message.

The SEIU began its strategy in this state in 2001 with Initiative 775, a measure promoted in the Voter's Pamphlet as a way to "help seniors and people with disabilities live at home with dignity and independence." In the small print was language creating one statewide bargaining unit for 26,000 people who cared for patients, often their relatives, at home. Citizens voted 63 percent yes for I-775, and the caregivers voted to join the SEIU.

Since then, the SEIU has dealt with the Legislature. In 2006, legislators passed a bill to put 10,000 in-home child-care providers into one statewide bargaining unit. In 2007, a rival union, the Washington Federation of State Employees, pushed through another bill that put subsidized providers of adult home care — 1,850 owners — into one statewide bargaining unit.

And now, backed by the SEIU and the Washington Education Association, comes the bill to unionize some 12,000 employees and owners of child-care centers. The child-care chains — KinderCare, La Petite Academies, and others — and the YMCAs have gotten themselves exempt from it, though they still oppose it. Single day-care centers, including ones run by churches, will be under the law if they accept even one state-subsidized child.

What to think of all this? In one sense, I admire the SEIU. While the AFL-CIO complains about the federal labor law, the SEIU goes state by state and writes a special law for each group it wants. As a strategy, it is brilliant, and it often does help workers with limited bargaining power.

As a taxpayer, I am not so comfortable. State government has 108,700 employees who gain sustenance from my pocket. If the child-care-center bill passes, the special labor laws of the past seven years will have reclassified almost 50,000 private-sector workers — and owners! — as state employees for purposes of bargaining. They will not be allowed state pensions — not yet — but their pay will be protected by contract, the same as state employees'. And every year, they will fund an organization pushing to bring new groups of workers the privileges of state employees.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com