Minimum Wage Rising For Fast Food, Health Care Workers. Where Does That Leave Child Care Workers?

Waverly Stone, a family child care provider in Rialto, drove two hours to the San Fernando Valley Monday morning to rally with her fellow child care providers and demand higher wages.

“We don’t get paid enough,” Stone said. “Basically, by the time I get through paying my workers, there’s nothing there.”

Like many family child care providers, Stone says she’s been providing child care for the past 22 years because she loves working with young children. But the costs to run a child care service out of her home aren’t keeping up. And as wages are rising in other industries, child care workers are feeling left behind.

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In April, minimum wage for fast food workers rose to $20 an hour in the state, and will rise to $25 for health care workers. Stone said she pays $20 an hour to each of her two employees to keep up with the competition, but that leaves little for her own-take home pay.

Waverly Stone, right, is a family child care provider in Rialto. Shanae Pharaoh, left, sends her two children to Stone's child care program.

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Sylvia Hernandez, a family child care provider in Van Nuys, said she estimates her take-home pay is about $7 an hour after she factors in the costs of running her business, paying her staff and accounting for her long hours.

She works around a lot of parents’ long, non-traditional hours. The first child she cares for gets dropped off at 5:30 a.m., and the last child gets picked up at 1:45 a.m. — amounting to about 21 hours of work.

“I like my job, I like working with families,” she said. “I know that if I don’t have my doors open, these parents cannot go to work.”

The Child Care Providers Union, which represents Hernandez and some 40,000 family child care providers, has been working to change the way the state reimburses providers for caring for low-income families. Max Arias, chair of the union, said they’ll start negotiating with the state in October.

“At the end of the day, they do need to also be able to pay themselves, which is something that historically, they have not been able to do,” he said.

Family child care provider Sylvia Hernandez says she serves many families who work non-traditional hours in the health care industry.

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‘Historically undercompensated’ 

Across the state in 2023, early childhood educators made about $18-19.50 an hour, according to a report by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The report found that 30% of child care workers, a majority of them women of color, relied on safety net programs themselves.

Donna Sneeringer, chief strategy officer at the Child Care Resource Center, says her organization has been feeling the pressure to find qualified teachers as wages have been increasing in other sectors.

“I think that folks underestimate how challenging it is to care for a group of children, and it is a difficult job. It's very demanding. It is emotionally taxing, physically taxing, and it has been historically undercompensated,” she said.

For CCRC’s Head Start programs, the organization is taking the federal government up on an agreement to raise teacher wages by reducing the number of children they serve to be more competitive in attracting workers.

“It's been much more challenging to find qualified employees, and that's why we've decided to make this shift,” she said.

For programs that aren’t subsidized by the federal or state government, she said it’s difficult to raise wages because higher costs can’t just be passed down to families.

“We've done a tremendous amount of studies looking at the childcare market as a failed economic market where the service is more expensive than the consumer can afford,” she said. “The consumer themselves cannot really afford to pay more than what they’re already doing.”