By Caitlin Salter MacDonald
Hundreds of children in the community spend their days at day-care centres, but a new study shows that low wages and poor working conditions in Canadian day-care centres are causing qualified childcare workers to abandon the field.
A study by the Child Care Human Resources Sector Council found that full-time childcare workers earn an average of $19,000 a year, and many earn close to minimum wage. The result is high staff turnover, and fewer qualified early childhood educators willing to take the jobs.
Childcare worker Kate Paquette works at Centretown Parents Daycare on James Street. Each day she and her two colleagues feed 13 toddlers nutritious meals and snacks, read them stories, change their diapers, get them dressed and ready to go outside, lie with them until they all fall asleep for their naps, and clean up after it’s all done.
Paquette says people don’t realize how demanding her job is, both physically and mentally. “You’re lifting children constantly, moving tables changing activities,” she says. “It’s hard on the body.”
In addition, she says, she’s responsible for “the emotional education and development of children.”
Working conditions at Centretown Parents Daycare, a non-profit corporation, are relatively good, and its employees are unionized. Paquette has been working there part time while she finishes her degree in child studies at Carleton University.
She is already a graduate of Algonquin College’s early childhood education program.
“I’m over-qualified, that doesn’t help,” says Paquette. She has been looking for a full-time childcare job for almost five months, but good jobs are hard to find. She says she was recently interviewed for a job taking care of 15 toddlers with pay of $10.50 an hour and no benefits.
Rachel Besharah is the president of a union representing employees of 10 Ottawa childcare centres. She says unionized childcare workers in Ottawa are relatively well paid.
“There is a huge discrepancy between unionized and non-unionized workers,” says Besharah. “It’s $17 instead of $9.” She says the majority of day-care centres in Ottawa are not unionized.
“The reality is that even $17 is not an adequate wage,” says Besharah. She says childcare workers are not paid well enough to have children’s lives in their hands.
She says low pay means fewer early childhood education graduates are willing to take on the work. “There has been this mass exodus from the field.”
The Sector Council study found only 42 per cent of early childhood education graduates were still working in childcare five years after graduation.
The study says staffing problems could affect the federal government’s plans for a national childcare program.
The government has promised $5 billion over five years to create an affordable program available to all Canadians.
Lorna Sutton says her daughter was on day-care waiting lists for a year and a half.
“I called every day-care I could find, and I got one call back,” she says.
Sutton’s three-year-old is now spending her days at Wellington Ward (Ottawa) Child Care Centre on Lisgar Street.
The single mother and Algonquin College student says she doesn’t know what she would do if she didn’t have good day- care arrangements.
Paquette says though many of the parents she talks to appreciate what she does, on the whole most people don’t value childcare as a profession.
“They think I’m a babysitter,” she says. “It’s not just about keeping them safe and feeding them and having them sleep.”
Paquette says awareness is the key to changing perceptions. “We have to respect the learning and development that occurs in the first five or six years.” More funding, she says, is also needed.
Paquette says she is still optimistic that someday things will change. “I don’t think I would’ve gotten into it if I didn’t have hope.”