Introducing the Thursday Throughline, a new weekly feature from NYCETC.
A throughline is the thread that runs through a story and ties it together. New York’s workforce story spans reports, budgets, hearings, and the experiences of workers and providers. Each Thursday, we’ll pull one thread: a report, data point, or policy development. We’ll show how it connects to the issues our coalition works on every day and to the voices we’ve featured on The NYC Workforce Drop. Every edition ends with a concrete recommendation for policymakers, employers, or our field.
Our first Throughline looks at NYCETC member United Neighborhood Houses’ new report, Building a Strong Foundation, and what it tells us about the people who make child care expansion possible.
New York’s child care expansion is an economic investment. It lets parents work, helps employers keep talent, and creates jobs in an essential industry. Its success depends on whether child care providers can afford to stay in the field. Right now, many cannot: in 2023, New York City child care workers had a median income of just $25,000, the lowest of any care workers in the city and 45% of the median for all other workers.
United Neighborhood Houses’ Building a Strong Foundation finds that the community providers it surveyed receive, on average, 36% less per child than the cost of high-quality care, as estimated by UNH’s cost model. Expanding access means funding the workforce and the full cost of running these programs. That is the argument behind NYCETC’s statement, Universal Childcare Is Free. The Workers Aren’t, and our conversation with Lauren Melodia of the Center for New York City Affairs on The NYC Workforce Drop: care workers are our city’s most essential infrastructure.
Other cities and states offer forward-thinking approaches to paying early childhood educators more. Washington, D.C., and New Mexico use dedicated public funding to support higher child care wages, with New Mexico pairing long-term investment with targeted wage supplements. Approaches vary, but the lesson is consistent: government can raise the revenue, set compensation expectations, and ensure the money reaches the people providing care.
NYC should establish a recurring city-state compensation equity fund, built into early childhood contracts, with salary progression, benefits, annual adjustments, and a separate formula for home-based providers. Dedicated progressive revenue, such as a high-income surcharge or a payroll assessment on large employers, should be evaluated to sustain it. The proposed Early Learning Child Care Act, which would fund care through an employer payroll tax, is one starting point for that discussion.
New York has already shown what temporary support can accomplish and what happens when it ends. The Schuyler Center documents a decline in full-time educator bonuses from $3,000 in 2023 to $2,250 in 2024. Two subsequent state budgets provided no dedicated child care workforce funding, and the FY2027 budget omitted the proposed compensation fund. The state’s separate employer cost-sharing pilot helps some working families afford care, but it does not close educators’ wage gaps. Making care affordable for parents and making care work financially sustainable for educators require investment on both sides.
New America’s history of employer-sponsored benefits shows why a lasting public commitment matters. Employers should help build community care capacity, and families should keep their access to care when they change jobs. Fund compensation parity as an explicit part of early childhood expansion. A teacher’s path to a decent wage should not depend on which building houses the classroom or on how old the children are.