The Massachusetts Society of Professors (MSP) led a union rally stroller parade from the Student Union to the Whitmore Administrative Building on Friday, Nov. 1 at noon to call for expanded on-campus childcare.

University Staff Association (USA) members, Professional Staff Union (PSU) members and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) were amongst the roughly 70 people in attendance. The announcement was made on the MSP Amherst Instagram account.

“We have a strong set of unions on this campus that bargain collectively for our wages and working conditions, and in our view, having child care and adequate child-care is what lets us do our jobs,” Marc Liberatore, a faculty member in the College of Information and Computer Sciences and co-president of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, said. “So it’s a no brainer for the unions to work together and put forward a list of proposals and then organize to win them. Things like this event are the ways that we demonstrate the administration to the management and the president’s office.”

The contract bargaining membership survey results came from the USA Communications Committee in Aug. 2024.

Many staff, faculty and parents expressed their concerns over the Center for Early Education and Care (CEEC). According to its website, the CEEC does not accept children under 15 months and operates from 8:15 a.m. – 4:15 p.m.

Those who attended the rally expressed their disappointment, stating that infant care is desperately needed for working caregivers, operating hours do not align with a typical 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. workday at UMass Amherst and how the lack of accessible child care particularly impacts women and people of color, “creating barriers to advancing a career or simply remaining in a job.”

“None of us have 15 months of paid leave when you have a baby. You have maybe 12 weeks, depending on your union,” Eve Weinbaum, a faculty member and professor of sociology and labor studies and vice president of the faculty and librarians’ union on campus, said. “But UMass has no child care for the first 15 months of a child’s life. There’s a big gap and in order to be able to do our work, work with our students and to be productive, we have to have child-care.”

Liberatore has two children. When he sent his children to childcare, his oldest attended the childcare on campus while his youngest had to attend an off-campus facility due to the long waitlist.

“If you’re a student here, faculty and the staff that run this place, their families have a life outside of work and they need to be able to come to work and not worry and not stress and also be able to not pay their bills.” Liberatore said.

In front of the Whitmore Administration Building, David Pritchard, a union representative for UAW 2322, read a letter written by the Smith College Center for Early Childhood Education at Port Hill in Sept.

“[Smith College wants] to make it clear that the societal and institutional structures that you are up against and the changes you are advocating for are not isolated to your campus alone,” Pritchard read. “They are incredibly important to the well-being of our community and the world at large.”

“We know that early childhood education here is vital to the functioning of our communities,” Pritchard continued. “And yet this work historically performed by women and people of color is notoriously undervalued and underpaid each day. Early childhood educators go to work to care for the youngest students on these college campuses so that their parents may confidently fulfill them as professors, researchers, administrators and more.”

The rally ended at 1:30 p.m.

Kalina Kornacki can be reached at [email protected] or followed on Twitter @KalinaKornacki.