Labor council in Pierce County wants to establish flexible child care facility for laborers

The Pierce County Central Labor Council is taking on an ambitious task — figuring out the problem of child care for working families.

It’s a problem that Nathe Lawver, secretary-treasurer for the council, knows well.

“Any conversation on workforce, within twenty minutes you’re talking about child care,” Lawver said. 

So, when one of the labor unions he works with as part of his council work mentioned they wanted to buy an old Tacoma elementary school and operate it as a partial child care facility for their members, but that they didn’t have the money, it got Lawver thinking.

“We’re not doing enough to fix that problem,” Lawver said. “So organized labor is coming together to step in and to make a solution for that.”

Now the council, with commitment from the city, trade school partners and some area nonprofits, has a goal to buy the old Willard Elementary School in east Tacoma and test it out. 

The idea is to make the project flexible, accommodating child care for workers in registered building trade apprenticeships. Eventually, the goal is to have the facility open 24 hours to accommodate early morning and late night work in these trades. 

Lawver said folks working in that industry, or even wanting to pursue a career in it, can face real hurdles when child care facilities don’t accommodate different or changing work schedules. 

A group of labor leaders touring the space with Lawver in February spoke about their own experiences juggling childcare with their work.

Amber Glennon is an organizer and member of the Laborers International Union of North America, Local 252. That union represents workers in the building trades. Glennon got her start through the union’s apprenticeship. 

“I wish that this would have been an option when I was an apprentice,” Glennon said. “But it’s going to help so many people, men and women, all of us,” Glennon said. 

Glennon is a single mom. She lives with her parents so they can take on child care when she’s working. 

“This to me is like, warming my heart so much because I know there’s going to be so many families that are going to benefit from this building and be able to continue their careers and have way more opportunities,” Glennon said. 

In a 24-hour period, Lawver estimated that the space could serve over 200 kids.

 Lisa Forsberg, a business representative with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 76 and chair of the union’s women’s committee, sees how a lack of child care holds apprentices back.

“A lot of times what I hear from our training center is that … ‘Oh, I can’t be dispatched past a certain radius from my house because of child care,’ or, ‘I can’t work a full day because I have to pick up my kid,’ because of how they’re trying to manage their child care,” Forsberg said. 

That can impede someone from getting their licensing, making their full wages or even getting health care.

In Pierce County, over 44% of construction trade workers have children, according to WorkForce Central, an organization that offers job training and other connections between workers and employers. Over 37% of those working as technicians or in maintenance and repair have children and just over 30% of production workers do. 

“ Our child care infrastructure is not set up in a way to support shift work in the way it’s designed in most infrastructure and construction projects,” said Katie Condit, who is the CEO of WorkForce Central.

This can result in a less diverse workforce if single parents can’t enter the workforce because they lack child care, and Condit said there’s a need for more workers in the building trades.

“ We have a lot of infrastructure investment that’s happening in this community and that we can predict will be occurring over time for the next 10 to 15 years,” Condit said. “That requires an increase in construction skilled laborers.”

The building will also operate as a space for classrooms and other training programs of these trades to work out of. There’s also a goal to establish a childcare apprenticeship program at the space with local unions, which is meant to address the need for more childcare workers. 

“We’ll be able to train folks for some of the positions that our workforce community, or that our businesses really need,” said Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards.

The city of Tacoma received a $10,000 grant in January to help with the planning stages for the project, including a  comprehensive business plan, baseline data collection and facility design, according to Woodards.

“ When we talk about how things are so unaffordable and how housing is unaffordable, when we look at that, programs like this really address the issues that we’re talking about,” Woodards said. 

Part of the plan hinges on the governor’s budget — the labor council has asked for a one-time investment from the state for nearly $5 million to buy the building and work on capital improvements. If that comes through, Lawver said he thinks it will take about a year to make those improvements.

Once it’s up and running, there’s ambitions to expand this model to serve workers in other industries, including health care and manufacturing.

“We’re not going to fix this for Washington state, but we sure as heck can fix it for Pierce County,” Lawver said.