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El Ciudadano

Original article: Sala Cuna: Sin las trabajadoras, no hay reforma

By Silvia Silva, Vice President of Management and Finance at CUT, and National President of Ajunji

This week, the childcare facilities project was discussed in the Senate Education Committee. Once again, we—the workers and educators who uphold this system—found out through the press. This is no mistake; it is a way of conducting politics.

During the processing of this project, something exceptional was achieved: a broad agreement among labor stakeholders to address the main challenges of a complex reform. This consensus was not improvised but resulted from a serious process of social dialogue. Today, it seems that path is being abandoned.

It has been insisted that the Government has held meetings with relevant actors, but in the case of CUT and early childhood education worker organizations, references to childcare facilities were superficial, lacking real discussion on content or definitions. This is not participation; it is a formality that strips dialogue of its meaning. Workers have valuable contributions to make.

Moreover, reopening the discussion on funding not only disregards already established agreements but also introduces unnecessary uncertainty into a project that needs precisely the opposite: clarity, stability, and responsibility. This design was constructed on the basic principle of not placing the financial burden on working families, but rather advancing towards a solidarity fund supported by employer contributions and fiscal backing.

The evidence is unequivocal: childcare facilities are a crucial policy for female labor participation. Today, hundreds of thousands of women remain outside the labor market due to caregiving responsibilities, a burden that disproportionately falls on us.

Weakening this project—or worse, doing so at the expense of the workers themselves—would be a setback that is hard to justify.

It is also essential to set a clear limit: this reform cannot advance at the expense of public early childhood education. It cannot be implemented without considering the strains on a system that currently supports the most vulnerable families, diverting resources or weakening a network that reaches where the private sector cannot, but where the women and children of Chile do.

Labor reforms cannot be imposed; they must be constructed. When attempts are made to move forward without those who sustain the workforce, the result is not a reform, but a future problem.

In this context, CUT is not willing to validate decisions made without real participation. This is not a corporate dispute; it is about ensuring that a key public policy is not weakened in its design or legitimacy.

The Government still has time to correct its course. But this requires a basic step: stop speaking of dialogue and start practicing it. Because without workers, there can be no reform.

Silvia Silva

La entrada Childcare Facilities: Without Workers, There Can Be No Reform se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.