BERKELEY, CA —A new report from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley details the low wages and scant benefits that California’s early care and education (ECE) workforce earn both statewide and in five regions. The state’s child care workforce is still short 7,000 jobs since before the pandemic and has been bypassed by the recent national jobs recovery. The study is the first comprehensive examination of California’s workforce in 15 years.
Early educators earn far less than California’s living wage of $83,000 a year:
- Licensed family child care providers (FCCs) who operate out of their homes report a median annual income of $16,200-$30,000 – the lowest wages of all California child care educators. These are the very same essential business owners who operated throughout the pandemic with little support from the state.
- Child care center-based wages for directors, teachers, and assistant teachers varied from $33,000 – $54,000 a year, depending on position.
Benefits are scant:
- Retirement is nonexistent – Only one in five of home-based child care providers in California has retirement savings.
- FCC providers, both small and large, are less likely than center directors or teaching staff to have health coverage. Their most commonly reported source of insurance coverage was through a spouse, partner, or parent.
“These persistently low wages are tough to begin with, but no match for skyrocketing inflation,” said report author Elena Montoya, CSCCE Senior Research & Policy Associate. “Parents can’t afford to pay more, so we can’t expect child care workers to see a pay increase without government intervention.”
Yet, California’s state budget does not include compensation funding or financial relief for the child care workforce. This is in contrast to over half of other states who have used federal covid funds to provide higher salaries and benefits or financial relief stipends. To make matters worse, early care and education workforce support was stripped from the federal Inflation Reduction Act.
“It’s been fifteen years since our last comprehensive study of the child care workforce compensation, and so little has changed,” said Lea Austin, executive director of CSCCE. “In fact, we find that some wages actually decreased since 2006.”
Low wages limit the ability to recruit and retain early educators, which in turn impacts the ability of parents to access the child care services they want and need in order to work. Without public funding to address compensation, these challenges will persist.
The report outlines several policy solutions, including:
- Ensure that all state policies are made in consultation with early educators.
- Establish requirements and dedicate sufficient public funding for all programs to meet wage and benefit standards. Require and monitor adherence to those standards as a condition of funding.
- Prioritize stable contract-based funding arrangements for home-based providers and centers.
About the study:
From October through December 2020, the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) surveyed representative samples of approximately 2,000 center administrators and 3,000 home-based family child care (FCC) providers, as well as non-probability samples of about 2,500 center-based teachers and assistant teachers and 280 transitional kindergarten (TK) teachers through the 2020 California Early Care and Education Workforce Study.