The Child Care Facilitated Enrollment Project for Working Families
NLF Highlights for April 2024
In the long list of expenses crushing American workers, childcare is one of the heaviest. According to the Economic Policy Institute, annual costs vary wildly throughout the country, but in the state of New York, it’s $15,394. For workers who have endured decades of stagnant wages, sky-high rents, ballooning student debt, and much more, such an enormous additional expense is nearly impossible to bear. Parents in New York City have had significant relief through the universal public pre-K and 3K childcare programs established by former mayor Bill de Blasio, but current mayor Eric Adams has cut those programs by nearly half a billion dollars, undermining the most basic functioning of the program and leaving many parents in the lurch.
One bright spot in the crazy quilt of local, state, and federal childcare policy, however, is New York’s facilitated enrollment program. Established two decades ago and backed by a coalition of unions, the program is funded by the state of New York and provides childcare for children up to age thirteen and is aimed at New York City’s working parents whose income is above the poverty line. Public programs aimed at workers often include numerous and confusing bureaucratic hoops to jump through; the facilitated enrollment program, as its name suggests, aims to make enrollment easy.
To discuss the program for our podcast Reinventing Solidarity, New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht spoke to two of the program’s champions: Janella Hinds and Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi. Ms. Hinds is vice president for Academic High Schools at the United Federation of Teachers, secretary-treasurer of the New York City Central Labor Council, and the chair of the New York Union Child Care Coalition. Andrew Hevesi represents Queens’s 28th Assembly District in the New York State Assembly, a position he has held since 2005. He is the Chair of the Assembly Standing Committee on Children and Families in January 2021.
- Reinventing Solidarity Episode Episode 48 – “The Child Care Facilitated Enrollment Project for Working Families”
- Legacies of Organizing at CUNY: The Power of Collective Action– Wednesday, April 10, 2024, 6:30pm – 8:30pm (ET) virtual and in-person event
- Social Movement Histories in Practice: Oral History, Political Education, & Art – Friday, April 12, 2024, 11:00am – 4:30pm (ET) Virtual and in-person conference
The United Auto Workers achieved a real breakthrough in their 2023 strike against the Big Three automakers. For this episode, our new editor-at-large Micah Uetricht interviews longtime labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein about his piece in the Spring 2024 issue of New Labor Forum assessing the wins in the contract, the corruption scandals and subsequent new union leadership victory that led to the strike, the UAW’s prospects for riding this momentum into organizing nonunion automakers like Volkswagen and Tesla, and more.
Listen here: SLU.CUNY.EDU/PODCAST