Correction Appended

In the largest successful organizing drive in New York City in half a century, 28,000 child care providers will join the city’s teachers’ union as the result of an overwhelmingly pro-union vote, state officials said yesterday.

Officials of the State Employment Relations Board said yesterday that 8,382 home-based child care providers voted to unionize and 96 voted against doing so. The providers mailed in ballots from Sept. 5 to last Thursday.

Under state rules, even though far less than the 28,000 providers voted, the United Federation of Teachers won the right to represent them all because a majority of those who did vote voted to unionize.

Tammie Miller, who looks after six children at her home near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, hailed the results.

“Unionizing is the only hope that we have as child care providers to make our voices heard and to get the respect we deserve,” Ms. Miller said. “We were totally isolated. We were being ignored by city and state agencies.”

Many child care workers favored unionization because they were dissatisfied with their pay, averaging $19,000 a year, according to a recent survey, and with the lack of health insurance and paid vacations.

This is the largest successful unionization campaign in the city since 1960, when 45,000 teachers joined the United Federation of Teachers.

Several unions agreed over the past year that the teachers’ union would seek to unionize the child care workers in New York City while the Civil Service Employees Association would try to unionize child care providers in the suburbs and upstate. The C.S.E.A. has already unionized 7,500 of the 25,000 workers it was given jurisdiction over.

The unionization drive became possible after Gov. Eliot Spitzer signed an executive order in May giving 60,000 home-based providers the right to unionize. That order covers providers who care for the children of low-income workers whose day care is subsidized by the federal and state governments.

Previously, those providers could not unionize because they were considered independent contractors. But Mr. Spitzer’s order made them quasi-employees, and the U.F.T. will now negotiate with the state over wages and benefits for the 28,000 workers in the city.

“This is an exciting opportunity for child-care providers,” said Barbara Deinhardt, the chairwoman of the State Employment Relations Board. “It shows the commitment of Governor Spitzer to these workers and to low-wage workers in general.” Mr. Spitzer gave those workers the ability to unionize even though Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had opposed the idea. His administration estimated that unionizing day care providers could cost the city up to $100 million a year in increased wages and benefits.

“It’s going to put pressure on existing day care funding,” said E. J. McMahon, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute. “It’s going to increase day care costs for everybody. It will increase the power of two of the states’ most powerful unions.” He said Mr. Spitzer could have saved the state money and aggravation by simply granting the child care providers a higher pay rate instead of the right to unionize.

Olivia Golden, the director of state operations, said the governor’s executive order was intended to give people a voice in their working conditions and to improve the quality of child care in the state. She said that nothing in the order required the state to spend any extra money as a result of any negotiations with the child care workers and their union. She said the talks with the union would be a “conversation” and not collective bargaining.

Randi Weingarten, president of the teachers’ union, said one goal of unionization was to improve training for these workers. “I have a vision of educational unionism from birth through university,” she said. “Here you have child care providers who are not just custodians of kids, but they can play a pivotal role in teaching kids.”

Jeannette Gabriel, an adjunct professor of labor studies at the Joseph S. Murphy Center for Labor, Community and Policy Studies at the City University, said: “These are some of the lowest paid workers in the state. Labor has seen the importance of public sector organizing, and organizing these workers seems like an obvious way to help them.”

Correction: October 29, 2007

An article on Wednesday about a vote by New York City child care workers to join the city’s teachers’ union misstated the status of a parallel effort by the Civil Service Employees Association to unionize child care providers in the suburbs and upstate. The C.S.E.A. has already unionized 7,500 of the 25,000 workers it was given jurisdiction over; the effort is not “pending.”

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