Quote Originally Posted by Suzie_Homemaker View Post
Undercut prices hurt everyone at least for little while. Sometimes it good to educate new providers and plant little seeds of thought.

Do you have FB? It used a lot in little communities like this one. Try setting up a providers support page. Like this forum but local provider and be quick to remove nasty poster and trolls. Then begin to slowly plant seeds.

Sometime when carer ask about rates, they don't see that they working for free. They don't know what can be claimed. So they providing food out of pocket and cheap care. When you break down these cost and let me figure out they working for peanut, then they start to increase fee. This is good. When not competing on price, means competing on service. This where experience counts.

Encourage fee increases. Encourage paid leave. Encourage fair rates. Encourage common practices. All help to be profession and grow contact and support but also held stabilize market place. Take time though. Over time too, natural progression of inexperience showing too. Tricky to manage large group of 7 children if not used to it. Tricky to know ways to help sleep train, toilet train, if not used to it. Many parents learn to value knowledge of experienced carer once they encounter lack of knowledge and unsure themselves.

I tried not to consider the $22 a day people as competition. These were not client I want anyway. But it can be hard to think that way. Try and remember that every place has not so good client who don't value carer. Try and think of cheap carers as people who suck up poor client and leave way clear for you to get good client. Understand? Hard to explain.

When people work for $22 a day or super cheap rates, in time they feel under valued because they are under valued. This effects motivation for works. In time, these carer can struggle to be motivated early morning get up and long day with grumpy children. They start to slip. They also must cut costs so little added value services. Cheapy crafts if any. Cheapy food. IT challenging job to be motivated for lots of year unless really love doing it. Many $22 a day carer not doing it for love but because they think easy money. Soon understand it not easy money and not big money so they move along. You just have to hold on until they do.
It makes complete sense. I was part of a providers association with over 100 members at one time when I was in the city. I tried to get in on something here but boy is it ever an aggressive click. I tried to set one up for the exact same reasons you outlined but this region has a bad reputation within the home daycare community for being none compliant when it comes to working together. Just ask those organizers of Bill 10 day of action. The providers want no part of it and honestly my thoughts based on what I know of a lot of providers is that it's because they aren't playing by the books so want to stay invisible. New providers who are stay at home mums seem to be open to it, but I'm closing in a few months so really don't have the incentive to invest the time anymore although if I wasn't, then I probably would work at getting something together even if it meant not including the old schoolers who seem to be threatened by the idea of collaborating with their competition to provide better care and working standards all around. It really is a funny region.