Employees at KinderCare Capitol in Olympia have filed for a union election, seeking to join SEIU 925 to secure better pay, benefits and safe staffing levels. If a majority votes for representation, the small group of about 20 teachers and a cook will become the first KinderCare workers in the country to unionize at the largest private early education provider in the United States.
At a child care center, a staffing shortage rarely looks like an ordinary personnel problem. It shows up in the inability to take a quiet lunch break, stay home with a fever, finish a shift on time or even relieve a colleague who is watching a classroom alone. For parents, it is often an invisible part of the morning routine: the door opens, a child is handed to a teacher, and the day begins. But employees at Capitol Childcare Center have decided to bring this hidden side of their work into public view.
The National Labor Relations Board docketed the petition on November 9. SEIU 925 is seeking an election among full-time and regularly scheduled part-time teachers, as well as the center’s cook; administrators, managers and supervisors are excluded from the proposed bargaining unit. Federal agency documents list 20 employees. The parties must now agree on the group’s composition and the voting process or go through a procedure set by the labor agency.
Workers say their decision was prompted not by a single incident but by the day-to-day conditions of the profession: low pay, inadequate benefits, turnover and understaffed classrooms. Teacher Jennifer Boisvert stressed that children need consistent relationships with familiar adults. Teachers, she said, need a decent wage, proper breaks, the ability to finish work on time and not to come in sick. Her colleague Wren Schmid said the center had lost two teachers in the past month and could not hire replacements quickly enough.
In Washington, staffing levels are not just a subject of labor disputes but also part of licensing rules. The state requires centers to meet adult-to-child ratios and group-size limits: the usual ratio for infants is one staff member for every four children, and for toddlers, one for every seven. But meeting the rules does not eliminate the problem: even a system that stays within licensing minimums may leave little room for illness, lunch breaks, vacation, training a new hire or simply an unexpectedly difficult day.
That is why the story of a small center in the state capital has broader significance. In March, Washington lawmakers passed a law establishing a Child Care Workforce Standards Board. The board is tasked with examining pay, recruitment and retention, working conditions and staffing standards, then making recommendations. The law grew out of an obvious contradiction: child care is expensive for families, yet the people who provide it often live with financial insecurity themselves.
KinderCare Learning Companies is a publicly traded corporation that operates more than 1,500 centers nationwide. The company’s 2025 annual report says it had about 43,700 employees, including more than 42,000 teachers, center staff and field teams. It also said that none of its employees was represented by a union at the time. SEIU 925 estimates that the chain operates about 70 locations in Washington state.
SEIU 925 already represents thousands of child care workers across the state, but the KinderCare campaign would test the union at a new scale. Filing for a union election does not automatically make a group unionized: workers still have to win the vote or secure voluntary recognition from the employer, then negotiate a first contract. But the petition itself changes the usual order of things. Issues that typically get lost in schedules, shift coverage and urgent calls to colleagues at a child care center are now becoming the subject of a collective conversation—and possibly a collective bargaining agreement.
Based on: Olympia childcare workers to unionize, seeking better pay, staffing