Introduction

In Chapter 1, I argued that theorizing contemporary childcare movements requires attention to the connected ways in which childcare labour and maternal work are differentially devalued forms of social reproduction. This entails putting marginalized mothers’ organizing firmly back at the centre of childcare politics. This chapter draws on research on the Big Steps Campaign (United Voice, 2018) and interviews with Australian early years educators who walked out over equal pay repeatedly in 2017/18 and investigates the extent to which the campaign and walkouts are disconnected from earlier feminist attempts – especially black and socialist feminist mobilizing – to revalue and redistribute childcare.

The discontent of educators who work in nurseries and crèches in Australia has been gaining momentum over the last five years, with a nationwide campaign and four nationwide days of action since March 2017, when 6,500 educators walked out of their jobs, affecting 30,000 families across Australia (United Voice, 2018). Despite a wave of mobilization among childcare workers in many post-welfare states since 2015, at present, there are relatively few studies of early years educators’ strikes and industrial action (Ferree and Roth, 1998; Mooney and McCafferty, 2005; Reese, 2010; Black, 2018). The Australian Big Steps walkouts constitute an important case because up to 2018, childcare workers had rarely repeatedly withheld their labour in such large numbers in the context of low levels of unionization and antilabour laws that limit industrial action.

This chapter explores the extent to which the Australian walkouts, which focused on gaining professional pay, were disconnected from community grassroots childcare movements. Drawing on the accounts of union officials, early years advocacy leaders, long-term activists and rank-and-file educators, I show that a movement focused on stepping up economic disruption and building a relational union were lines of tension amongst union members. Despite this, I argue that the walkouts constitute a turning point in the history of Australian ECE mobilizations that signals a shift towards modes of protest that privilege both economic disruption and relationality and highlight its implications for contemporary feminist divisions and solidarities.

This chapter refines the concept of intimate unions and argues that it needs to better capture parent– worker solidarity and the limited relationships between the stratified childcare workforces that are at stake in childcare struggles.