I'LL NEVER FORGET THE FIRST TIME I met Shirley Craig-head. In a voice made harsh by years of struggle and cigarettes, she outpreached any pastor as she addressed a room full of daycare providers. The spark of Shirley's oratory touched the gasoline of frustration felt by other middle-aged Black women whose meager paychecks from the state were three months late and who had moved way past the margins of economic survival. Within six years, Shirley and her sisters and brothers in DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality) had revamped the state's antiquated payroll system, won nearly $100,000 in back pay and, by 1996, made Rhode Island the only state in the country to offer fully paid health insurance to women who perform the back-breaking work of caring for other people's children. As I spent the next 10 years organizing with them, Shirley and other daycare providers taught me the value of a mother's labor, in all its forms. Looking back on the successes and failures of DARE's Home Daycare Justice Committee and its successor, the Day Care Justice Coop, I see clear lessons for the trade unions that have shown a growing interest in this group of workers.

Department of Labor statistics suggest that there are about 400,000 home-based childcare providers in the United States. Unions have been going after this potentially huge group of workers by putting their tremendous political clout into lobbying efforts to get permission from executive or legislative branches of government to represent them. These campaigns are accompanied by intensive efforts to convince providers to sign up for AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), SEIU (Service Employees International Union) or both.

Family childcare is a tricky occupation to organize under traditional union models. Trade unions in the U.S. are based on an employee/employer form of work. Since daycare providers are technically individual small businesses, unions generally see legal authorization at the state level as necessary to avoid charges of anti-trust activity in collective bargaining. Community organizing approaches to childcare organizing, on the other hand, grow out of traditions like welfare rights or neighborhood organizing, in which poor people of color demand collective redress outside legal structures, often based on notions of moral or social rights. As union organizing efforts take off, the lessons of community organizing could go a long way toward building a powerful movement of family childcare providers.

It's about race. And gender, and how those systems of oppression intersect under capitalism to devalue the labor of women of color. Without that analysis, we get trapped in counterproductive rhetoric about professionalism and quality of care.

While all childcare labor is shaped by the unpaid work of mothering, the experiences of women of color in the field carry the harshest tradition of exploitation. Under plantation slavery, older women were forced to care for the children of younger women, who were put to work in the fields. That history combined with labor economics allow us to translate the atypical work and funding structure of childcare into numbers that everyone can understand-an hourly wage.

A 2002 study published by the Day Care Justice Co-op entitled Mucho Trabajo, Poco Dinero: The Labor Economics of Family Child Care in Rhode Island's Subsidy Program determined that the average wage for family childcare providers working in the state's subsidy program was $2.76 an hour, less than half the minimum wage. Yet none of the legislation or executive orders drafted by unions makes any mention of the actual hourly wage or even the fact that the compensation is dismally low. Exposing the system would debunk the myth of overpaid (read: unionized) public workers. In Rhode Island, public debate did not make this distinction, and opponents of the providers seized on the fact that one of the union's leaders grossed $90,000 a year for her daycare home, a sum that does not reflect paid assistants, substantial operating costs, long hours and an extra 15 percent self-employment tax. Instead of shamefully low wages based on the economy of racism and sexism, the public heard about union fat cats.

In the '90s, financial analysis of childcare work was often made in comparison with pay rates of janitors, sanitation workers and other laborers. The mostly white and college-degreed childcare center workers invariably reacted with indignation that they were paid the same as or less than people who clean toilets or handle trash. The rallying cry went up that "we are professionals and should be paid as such."

A decade later, the very same unions that represent janitors, sanitation workers and other laborers are in danger of falling into the same trap by embracing establishment definitions of "quality" and "professionalism." Iowa's executive order even goes so far as to cite some pretty miserable statistics about the supposed low quality of care the state system currently offers. Aside from the obvious strategic question (are people inspired to put public money into a system when you tell them it sucks?), this line of argument helps fuel a national trend to intensify the industry's racial heirarchy by tying pay rates to subjective "quality" designations. Quality of care becomes the code that makes racial disparities in compensation legitimate.