The Worthy Wage campaign for childcare workers is another place to see the outlines of a care movement. The campaign is a loose coalition of childcare advocacy groups in the states, inspired and supported by the Center for the Child Care Workforce. What moved the childcare crisis into the public spotlight, says Marcy Whitebook of the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of the center, was a study that linked preschool teachers' pay directly to quality of care. Low pay produces high teacher turnover, which in turn makes for insecure kids who don't make friends easily or engage with their environment. Interestingly enough, says Whitebook, many teachers were more comfortable pressing for the interests of children than for their own financial well-being.

"We knew that parents were our natural allies," says Lauren Tozzi, a Seattle preschool teacher and Worthy Wage activist. In 1994 she helped organize Seattle's first Worthy Wage Day, a day on which childcare centers close so teachers and parents can rally and lobby for more public resources. At first, parents groused about losing their childcare. "We didn't want it to look like a wildcat strike," says Tozzi, "so we did six months of preparation to get teachers and parents to become advocates." Teachers asked parents to attend the rally, make calls and visit legislators, but if they couldn't do any of that, to consider bringing their children to work. One father took his daughter and three other children. "It created complete havoc at his worksite," says Tozzi, and effectively told his co-workers, "You may not have children, but if I don't have childcare, it impacts you."

Spurred by this kind of grassroots organizing, Seattle's thriving childcare advocacy community has had a lot of successes. Last summer many preschool teachers joined District 925 of the SEIU, and the union then negotiated a master contract that covers eleven childcare centers. A Business/Child Care Partnership gets businesses to donate equipment, appliances and services to childcare centers, which the centers promise to convert into bonuses and wages for their staff. In an innovative program to let teachers advance while continuing to work with kids (instead of having to go into administration, where there's more money), Governor Gary Locke has put up $4 million to reward teachers for education and experience. John Burbank, director of the Economic Opportunity Institute, hatched the idea in a graduate school paper in 1994. Now he's helping to implement the program in a way that pushes childcare centers by requiring them to meet wage and benefits standards in order to qualify for the state money.

Another route to a united care movement is being pursued in Massachusetts, through a focus on wage legislation. Rick Colbath-Hess, a social worker and father of two young children, told a Harvard Living Wage rally last year, "I had to stop the work I love because we couldn't afford to keep two children in daycare and keep my job in human services." Colbath-Hess founded Massachusetts Service Employees for Rights and Viable Employment (MASS SERVE), which is spearheading a living-wage bill in the state legislature. Most living-wage laws are local ordinances that set minimum wages for employees of firms and agencies that contract with a city or county. They are limited not only by their small jurisdiction but also by the types of jobs they cover. Most (there are now more than forty) apply to workers who take care of things, not people--janitors, security guards, construction workers and food-service workers.

MASS SERVE is unusual because it unites workers who care for many different kinds of vulnerable people. Like Colbath-Hess, they all want to help people as their life's work. The coalition's Human Service Workers Living Wage Bill would insure that workers paid by state funds earn at least 135 percent of the federal poverty line for a family of 4, or $10.50 an hour. Colbath-Hess sees the organization not only as a "bridge between providers and unions" but also as a partnership between care workers and people who need care. In addition to the usual labor organizations that would be expected to support such a movement--the National Association of Social Workers, the Massachusetts Nurses Association and SEIU Local 509--MASS SERVE has received endorsements from Empower, an organization of mentally ill care recipients; and also from the Alliance for the Mentally Ill and Mass ARC, organizations of families affected by mental illness and retardation, respectively.

These little seedling movements are inspiring models for a grand care movement. They demonstrate the breadth of care as a political issue and the power of coalitions to put care on the public agenda. Above all, they prove the force of caring as a motive for political action.

Caring for each other is the most basic form of civic participation. We learn to care in families, and we enlarge our communities of concern as we mature. Caring is the essential democratic act, the prerequisite to voting, joining associations, attending meetings, holding office and all the other ways we sustain democracy. Care, the noun, requires families and workers who care, the verb. Caring, the activity, breeds caring, the attitude, and caring, the attitude, seeds caring, the politics. That is why we need a care movement.

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