Alicia Smith wakes up while it's still dark, eats breakfast in a hurry and makes her way to work. If she's lucky, she's remembered to pack her own lunch before she runs out the door. She gives Boots the dog one last pat.
In less than an hour, 76 children will be pouring through the door of the childcare centre where she works, with anxious parents in tow.
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Childcare workers to strike over pay
Hundreds of childcare works will walk off the job on International Women's Day on Wednesday over 'half' pay. (Video courtesy: ABC News 24)
She unlocks the gates at just before 7am and then it starts: conversations with mums and dads, notes about medication, food preferences, behaviours, endless questions. All the worry and all the love bundled into snatches of conversation.
Smith, 38, looks after babies from six weeks to 19 months, and she's second-in-charge at the centre. So on top of dealing with teaching, weeping and wailing, cuddling, teething, pooing, talking, reading, feeding, she's also doing administration.
How much is she paid?
Smith, who has a degree in early childhood education, earns $26 an hour. She lives with her border collie Boots in a Hobart house that has a $200,000 mortgage and an even bigger need for renovations.
After tax, each week, she clears just less than $810.
To make ends meet, she cleans the centre for three hours a night. That's her second job. It pays $26.58 an hour.
She makes more money per hour from her cleaning job than she does from caring for and educating our children.
To top up her income she works occasionally in hospitality, selling icecreams and drinks in concert intervals. That's $25 an hour too. But at least she doesn't need a degree in early childhood education to work in hospitality.
"I have to work three jobs so I can still work in childcare and live comfortably. But I want to make sure that educators coming through don't have to do what I have to do," she said.
That's the reason Smith and early childhood educators all over Australia will walk off the job at 3.20pm on Wednesday, International Women's Day. Smith earns $26 an hour but many in the industry earn less, some as little as $20 an hour. Across a week, that's half the national wage, to care and love and teach our children, to nurture them when we are not there.
To put it in context, a metal fitter and machinist earns $37.89 an hour. The Australian Bureau of Statistics average for the entire full-time equivalent workforce is $40.34. Payscale says an electrician earns around $30 an hour.
Smith hopes the walk-off will have an impact.
"I want to keep early childhood educators in the sector. Most of them have got family lives, they can't afford to live on the wages I live on."
United Voice, the early childhood union, says walk-offs show just how angry our educators are. Why 3.20pm? That's the time of day women in Australia start working free because of the intransigent gender pay gap.
United Voice's Helen Gibbons is calling on the federal government to fund equal pay.
"This problem should have been fixed decades ago and yet educators' wages don't come near reflecting their professional skills and responsibilities," she said.
And those skills and responsibilities are so vast.
By the end of each day, every parent will know what their children have been doing, morning to night, either in little books which the parents read at the centre where she works or through Story Park, an app where Smith shows parents exactly what their children are doing right at that minute: the clean, the messy, the peaceful, the shrieking. Parents love it. Those 7am tears? All gone by 7.05am in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing.
Before the day is over, Smith will have changed maybe 40 nappies, some of which are more aptly described as nappy explosions. She will have fed eight children two or three meals each. She will help babies get their heads around sitting up, or crawling. She will have read two or three books, pulled the play dough out of its container and put it back again, taken out the paint and the paint brushes, watch kids smother themselves in stuff, clean up and put everything away again. Letters. Medications. Band-Aids. Notes. Rocking babies to sleep, wiping, washing, more documentation in case of a dreaded incident report, when one kid bites another or falls over and scrapes their pillowy knees.
"It's a fantastic job and I love it," Smith says.
"But I've been in the sector for 12 years and you really have to consider the money situation, truly think if you can afford it."
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