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Category: Childcare

Workers Need Affordable Child Care

Posted on by Taylor Maag
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The start of 2023 presented some good news for America’s economic outlook. In the first week of January, the December jobs report was released, showing unemployment edging down to 3.5 percent with over 200,000 more people employed full-time. But even with this good news, an enduring conundrum remains: our country’s stagnant workforce participation rate.

The workforce participation rate represents the number of people working or actively looking for work. This job report showed that the U.S. labor participation rate is 62.3 percent, which has not changed since the beginning of 2022 and is only 1 percentage point higher than it was at the start of the pandemic.

This means roughly 38 percent of Americans who could be working are detached from the labor market because they believe there are no jobs available for them, or they are facing personal challenges that make it hard to retain employment. As a result, these individuals have stopped looking for work altogether, leaving employers desperate for talent and policymakers wondering where everyone went.

Few Child Care Options

There are many factors contributing to this social phenomenon. But one place to look for workers is in their homes with their kids.

Today, many families with young children must choose among bad options: spending a significant portion of their income on child care, finding a cheaper, but potentially lower-quality care option or leaving the workforce altogether.

While finding decent and affordable child care has always been a challenge, it’s been exacerbated in recent years due to increased demand from families for child care services, the rising cost of these services and the shortage of skilled workers and quality facilities.

Now it is one of the top reasons why workers, especially women, are not just leaving, but staying out of, the labor market. This is harmful for a myriad of reasons, not least that our country needs this talent to fill open jobs and keep our economy competitive.

Programs Not Enough

Hopes were high that President Biden’s Build Back Better plan would address this issue federally. But in the end, the child care provisions were not included. Last month’s appropriations package did include substantial funding increases for the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG), which received $8 billion, a 30 percent increase in funding, and for Head Start, which received $12 billion, an 8.6 percent increase.

As welcome as the new funding is, these programs serve a small portion of American families.

The CCDBG and Head Start resources are targeted at low-income families and, even then, the CCDBG serves only 15 percent of eligible families, and Head Start serves roughly one-third of eligible three-to-five-year-olds and 7 percent of eligible children under three. They don’t touch most working parents or solve the problem at scale.

As a result, states are developing solutions on their own.

This is a portion of a blog that was originally posted in full at The Hill on January 27, 2023. Republished with permission.

About the Author: Taylor Maag is director of workforce policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.


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Child care is a crisis screaming out for investment. Can Manchin and Sinema hear that?

Posted on by Laura Clawson
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Interview with Laura Clawson, Daily Kos Contributing Editor | Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Affordable, available child care was a major problem for many U.S. families even before the coronavirus pandemic—and now it’s a crisis. President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have plans to fix that if Senate Republicans will get out of the way, or Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will get on board with a budget reconciliation package that includes child care. But even if funding was passed into law tomorrow (which it won’t be), the child care crisis would persist, at least for a while. 

The U.S. child care system has so many problems that simply scaling it up would take time as well as money. Scaling up requires adding both facilities and workers, and both of those are challenging. In Portland, Oregon, for instance, child care providers told local news station KOIN about their difficulties setting up new facilities, from finding appropriate spaces to zoning and permitting to finding the funding to pay for renovations. 

“It gets costly to borrow, you know, and childcare—there’s a fine line in what you can charge and what makes you competitive in the marketplace for families who do need childcare and how much you can ultimately profit to pay off a loan,” said one provider who had already spent $200,000, with the help of grants, renovating a space to set up a new facility.

Then there are child care workers. This was already a high-turnover industry, thanks in part to low wages. A Biden administration fact sheet on the American Families Plan lays out the gruesome situation for these workers: “More investment is needed to support early childhood care providers and educators, more than nine in ten of whom are women and more than four in ten of whom are women of color. They are  among the most underpaid workers in the country and nearly half receive public income support programs. The typical child care worker earned $12.24 per hour in 2020—while receiving few, if any, benefits, leading to high turnover and lower quality of care.”

The Biden plan would pay a minimum wage of $15 an hour for child care workers, as well as supporting professional development and training. At the same time, subsidies to families would ensure that “families earning 1.5 times their state median income will pay no more than 7 percent of their income for all children under age five,” while care would be free for the lowest-income families. 

But, again, such a dramatic increase in capacity would take time to put into place, and we’ve been seeing how slowly funds can make their way to the people who need them: Emergency rental assistance, for example, has gone out at a glacial pace in many states, even with an eviction crisis looming.

”We estimate hundreds of thousands of new children will benefit … in the first year, and even more children will start to immediately benefit from increased quality and access,” a White House official told Politico, “by providing funds to states to build on their existing child care systems in a way that is tailored to the needs of communities in the state and provides parents with options to send children to the setting of their choice.”

Hundreds of thousands is good—but millions of children were without affordable, accessible child care prior to the pandemic, and the situation has only gotten worse.

The fact that Congress can’t just snap its fingers and create a whole new, wonderful U.S. child care infrastructure isn’t the reason to start working on it, though. It’s a reason to start working on it now, with major funding directed at the problem that’s become a crisis. The pandemic has showed us how critical child care is to the ability of parents to do their jobs. Too many women have dropped out of the paid workforce or scaled back their paid work to take care of their children, and if we want to reverse that rather than let women’s progress be set back by decades, this is a massively important intervention. Raising wages for workers—overwhelmingly women and very often women of color—doing an important job should also be a priority, and it’s one that would benefit children by reducing turnover of their caregivers. Funding child care is a key economic, educational, and moral intervention. Manchin and Sinema need to embrace it.

This post originally appeared at DailyKos on August 4, 2021. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson has been a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006 and a full-time staff since 2011, currently acting as assistant managing editor.


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COVID-19 has the child care industry in dire crisis, but there are two big reasons for hope

Posted on by Laura Clawson
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The child care industry and the workers in it—overwhelmingly women, many of them women of color—have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. Really hard. But now there are two big reasons for hope, thanks to child care funding in the COVID-19 relief bill passed by the House and to a rush of states opening up vaccinations to child care workers.

After losing 400,000 jobs early in the pandemic, the industry hasn’t fully rebounded. In December 2020, there were still nearly 175,000 fewer child care jobs than there were in December 2019. In an industry that operates on extremely tight profit margins, enrollments remain down due to both reduced class sizes for social distancing purposes and parents keeping their kids home rather than risking group settings, while expenses for personal protective equipment and cleaning are up.

According to a December study from the National Association for the Education of Young Children, 56% of child care centers say they are “losing money every day that they remain open.” The first glimmer of hope on that front came at the end of December, when the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2021 allocated $10 billion to child care, and that money is going out. In Pennsylvania, for instance, Gov. Tom Wolf announced plans this week for $303 million in federal money, including $140.7 million to support providers who have lost enrollment and $87 million in increased payments for providers who participate in subsidized care. 

But the COVID-19 relief package the House passed includes much more help: $39 billion. And, HuffPost’s Emily Peck reports, “the money is retroactive, so centers that are already in debt or behind on their rent or mortgage payments can catch up.” 

While Senate Republicans have objected to many of the provisions in the relief bill, and intend to do everything they can to delay its passage, they haven’t targeted the child care money, so there is hope that help is on the way.

There’s a more individual form of hope, too, for child care workers. Following President Biden’s call for teachers and child care workers to be vaccinated (or have gotten at least one shot) by the end of March, pharmacies participating in a federal vaccination program opened up eligibility to those groups across the country, regardless of whether they were yet eligible under state guidelines. But that wasn’t all. 

A series of states quickly moved to open up their own vaccination programs to teachers and child care workers, including Massachusetts (where Republican Gov. Charlie Baker made clear he wasn’t happy about it), Washington state, and Texas. Prior to Biden’s push, teachers and child care workers had already heard that they would soon become eligible in Ohio, Vermont, and New Jersey as the states continue to expand their vaccinations.

None of this is the end of problems for the industry or for its low-paid workers. Even before the pandemic, turnover was extremely high in daycare centers, and that’s only gotten worse during the pandemic. Median pay for child care workers is $11.65 an hour, according to one recent study. And despite the low pay, reliable, high-quality child care is not affordable for many families, keeping some women out of the workforce (at cost to their lifetime earnings) or leaving families with a series of bad choices. 

The pandemic has shown that child care is absolutely an economic issue, with increased work absences due to child care problems over the past year and many parents of young children—again, especially mothers—dropping out of the paid workforce entirely over it. There’s an immediate crisis here, but there’s also a long-term problem. It would be great if we could use the crisis to draw attention to the problem and look at longer-term fixes. But in the short term, keeping child care centers open and protecting their workers from COVID-19 are big steps.

This blog originally appeared at Daily Kos on March 5, 2021. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson has been a contributing editor since December 2006. Clawson has been full-time staff since 2011, and is currently assistant managing editor at the Daily Kos.


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How Coronavirus Exposed the Flaws of the Childcare Economy

Posted on by Sonali Kolhatkar
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The U.S. government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that childcare workers in the nation have a median salary of just over $24,000 a year—below the poverty line for a family of four. The segment of our nation’s workforce that attends to the basic needs of our children is shockingly underpaid, and now during the coronavirus pandemic, left even farther behind as childcare centers are forced to downsize or close. At the same time, billionaires have minted money during our time of national crisis. The fortunes of the wealthiest have increased by a quarter over the past several months, proving once more that the economy is rigged to benefit the already-rich.

It is no coincidence that an industry dominated by women, particularly women of color (40 percent of childcare workers are women of color—twice their population representation) is in dire straits. The vast majority of childcare workers do not have health insurance. Many are self-employed and, even before the pandemic, operated on razor-thin margins to stay financially afloat. While the cost of operating a childcare center is fixed, children age out quickly, making revenues extremely unstable. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The businesses have little in the way of collateral. Banks are rarely interested in lending to them, beyond costly credit cards, making it difficult to ride out rough patches.”

In other words, childcare is not a lucrative business in spite of its crucial nature, and while the cost of childcare for parents is often far too high, the cost of operating even a bare-bones childcare business is also too high.

Once the pandemic hit, many childcare providers simply lost clients as lockdowns required families to remain at home. According to one survey conducted in April 2020, “60% of programs [were] fully closed and not providing care to any children” at that time. While some workplaces were able to transition to remote environments, by its nature, childcare work was not able to adapt to this “new normal.” While many workers like grocery store employees, nurses, and delivery drivers were deemed “essential” to society and continued working, they needed care for their out-of-school children. Suddenly American women providing childcare found themselves out of work, while women in other industries had no access to the care their children required.

Millions of parents, mostly mothers, have already left the workforce to care for their children during the pandemic. The U.S. Census Bureau in August 2020 found that nearly 20 percent of “working-age adults said the reason they were not working was because COVID-19 disrupted their childcare arrangements.” Additionally, “women ages 25-44 [were] almost three times as likely as men to not be working due to childcare demands.”

Melissa Boteach of the National Women’s Law Center told Politico, “the parents who are not going to be able to go back to work or who are going to have to give up their careers or jobs for less pay—because they can’t find the child care to cover the hours that they need—are disproportionately going to be women and women of color.” In other words, women of color are disproportionately impacted on both ends of the childcare equation—both as providers and as customers who rely on these services.

As I prepared for an interview with Wendoly Marte, director of economic justice at Community Change Action, about the crisis of childcare, I fielded texts from my seven-year-old son who could not find an extension cord for the tablet that he uses for school. My child was in the room next to the home-studio that I work out of and knows never to disturb me during interviews. But he was desperate to turn his device on so he wouldn’t miss his next lesson. I found myself for the umpteenth time wishing I didn’t have to work so I could be more present for my children during a time of deep uncertainty. But I also remembered how much I loved my job and continued to speak with Marte, who explained that I was not alone. “I think a lot of parents have had to make really hard choices over the last few months as they tried to balance working from home and caring for their children,” said Marte, who helps to organize childcare workers and amplify their voices in government.

Like millions of American women, I find myself constantly worrying about the state of my children’s mental health during the pandemic. Isolated from their peers and forced to learn through screens and Zoom chats, they are coping as best as they can. I am terrified of the long-term impacts on them and yet unable to leave a job on which my family depends to help pay the mortgage and purchase necessities, and at the same time resenting the fact that I have to even consider leaving a job that I love and that I have invested years of my life in.

The pandemic has highlighted, in Marte’s words, the need for “a system that is truly universal and equitable and that takes into account the perspective of parents, the children, and the childcare providers.” She articulated that “we’re going to need a serious public investment in a bold solution that actually matches the scale of the crisis.”

There was a crisis in childcare even before the pandemic. More than a year ago, the Center for American Progress explained that “Whether due to high cost, limited availability, or inconvenient program hours, child care challenges are driving parents out of the workforce at an alarming rate,” and that, “in 2016 alone, an estimated 2 million parents made career sacrifices due to problems with child care.” Add to that a public health crisis that has no end in sight, and the U.S.’s childcare industry could collapse entirely under the weight of multiple pressures.

While the federal government made available small business loans through the Paycheck Protection Program earlier this year, the Bipartisan Policy Center concluded that the program did not work for childcare businesses and only about half of applicants ever received the government-backed loans. While the federal government’s “Childcare and Development Fund” provides some measure of support through block grants, according to Marte it is not nearly enough and “the money ran out very quickly.”

In late July, House Democrats passed the Childcare Is Essential Act, which Marte’s group has supported. The bill creates a $50 billion fund to buttress the reeling industry. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has made clear that he is far more interested in remaking the judicial system to benefit conservatives than ushering in financial aid bills for ordinary Americans.

President Donald Trump and his allies have expressed an eagerness to return to normal that is not couched in reality as a third wave of coronavirus infections threatens to derail the economy once more. Without direct federal government intervention to save the childcare industry, the future is frighteningly precarious for women, and especially women of color.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has shrewdly outlined a plan for what his campaign calls a â€ścaregiving economy,” promising to “[e]nsure access to high-quality, affordable child care and offer universal preschool to three-and four-year olds through greater investment, expanded tax credits, and sliding-scale subsidies.” The ambitious $775 billion plan is a start, and Biden will need to be held to his promises if he wins the White House.

When the coronavirus upended the economy, the crisis of childcare that had been brewing for years exploded and revealed the truly barbaric nature of a society that leaves human needs to the whims of “market forces.” There is no better symbol of a society’s future potential than the well-being of its children, and judging by that, we are in deep trouble.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.


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Child Care Workers Are Now a Mighty Force With a Huge New Union. It Only Took 17 Years.

Posted on by Hamilton Nolan
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A 17-year organizing campaign in California culminated this week in the successful unionization of 45,000 child care providers—the largest single union election America has seen in years. The campaign is a tangible achievement that brings together union power, political might, and social justice battles for racial and gender equality. Now, the hard part begins.

Child Care Providers United (CCPU), the umbrella group now representing workers across the state, is a joint project of several powerful SEIU and AFSCME locals in California. Those unions divided up the state by counties, and workers will be members of either SEIU or AFSCME depending on where they live, as well as being members of CCPU. 

The stage for this week’s vote was set last fall, when California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law legislation that granted bargaining rights to child care providers, who had previously been legally ineligible for unionization. Getting the law changed took 16 years, during which time it made it to the governor’s desk twice, but was vetoed—once by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and again by Jerry Brown. In the months since Newsom signed the bill, the unions used the networks they had already created over the past two decades to administer the election. The vote, announced yesterday, was 97% in favor of the new union.

The road to winning the union was so long that it has seen multiple generations participate. Miren Algorri, a child care provider in San Diego, first became involved because her mother, who was in the same line of work, was active in the campaign from the very beginning. “She would go to meetings, and I would stay behind and take care of the children,” Algorri said. When her mother retired, she carried on—and lasted long enough to see her years of work pay off. 

“It’s taken so long because the work that we do has always been minimized and infantilized,” Algorri said. “It’s because of the way society has seen child care from the very beginning of this country. The foundation was women of color caring for children. Doing work that, according to society, doesn’t require any skills.” The industry’s workforce in California is mostly women and about three-fourths people of color, according to the union. 

Though the bulk of the 17-year campaign was focused on the primary goal of winning the legal right to collective bargaining, it also allowed a disparate statewide workforce to organize and fight for their own issues along the way. (The group had a large pool of dues-paying members even before the law was changed last year.) Although CCPU is brand new as a formal union, it already boasts thousands of members who are seasoned in labor organizing and political lobbying. That will likely come in handy as the group moves into its next phase: negotiating a contract with the state of California. 

Providers who care for low-income children receive a set reimbursement rate from the state, and raising that figure is one of the top priorities in bargaining. Algorri said that in San Diego, she is paid $234 a week to care for an infant for up to 60 hours, and she is obligated to pay her assistants at least the local minimum wage of $13 per hour. That means she can often end up making less than minimum wage herself. She also wants a good healthcare plan, which almost all child care providers lack, as well as some way to save for retirement. “I have been working for 23 years. I have not earned one day of sick leave, and pretty much I don’t have a retirement plan,” she said. “We don’t want a red carpet. Just a decent living.” 

Max Arias, the executive director of SEIU 99, one of the unions behind CCPU, said that the coronavirus pandemic, which struck while the union election was still underway, offered a chance for child care workers to organize to fend off any budget cuts, and to fight to get proper personal protective equipment (PPE). The pandemic has also highlighted the fact that these child care workers are absolutely vital to not only reopening schools, but keeping the entire economy running. Providers have continued to work throughout the pandemic in large part to provide care to the children of other essential workers, so that they can work as well. If child care work becomes economically untenable, the entire system could grind to a halt. 

“Providers will play an outsize role [in school reopening]. A lot of parents are going to need support,” said Arias, whose union already represents thousands of school employees. He ticked off the immediate needs: funding for livable wages and healthcare for child care providers, and for adequate PPE to keep them safe and operational. “If we’re going to reopen the economy, the status quo funding that exists is not enough,” he said, adding that California needs a tax on billionaires, something that he believes the public would support at this moment. Until then, the child care providers will fight for themselves. They are already building a bargaining team, and Arias said that he hopes to have a contract in place within a year, given the urgency of the situation. 

The sheer number of CCPU members, and their established connections with the highest level of state officials and national unions, means that they will be a force in California politics for years to come. They also represent one of the most meaningful instances of material progress in labor power for low-wage workers of color in years. 

For the moment, they have earned the right to simply savor their victory. Miren Algorri brings up a taco shop in her area that has a sign reading, “Patience is the essence of good Mexican cuisine.” 

“It’s the same with us,” she said. “We’ve cultivated that quality over the years.” 

This blog originally appeared at In These Times on July 28, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporter for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. You can reach him at Hamilton@InTheseTimes.com.


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‘Crashing down’: How the child care crisis is magnifying racial disparities

Posted on by Eleanor Mueller
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Ninety-three percent of child care workers are women, and 45 percent are Black, Asian or Latino, while half of child care businesses are minority-owned.

The collapse of the child care industry is hitting women of color the hardest, threatening to stoke racial and gender inequities and putting pressure on Congress to address the crisis in its new round of coronavirus aid.

Black and Latina women are suffering a double-barreled blow as coronavirus-induced shutdowns batter the industry, since they dominate the ranks of child care providers and have long struggled to gain access to the services for their own kids.

The sector, which saw 60 percent of its programs close at the height of the pandemic before rebounding slightly, is still down some 237,000 workers from last year — a number that’s likely to grow as states shut down again, economists say. Some projections show the industry could permanently lose half its programs. Two in 5 child care providers this month said they will shut for good without an infusion of federal funding.

The issue is shaping up to be a key faultline as Congress this week enters negotiations over the next round of coronavirus aid, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he hopes to clear before August recess.

If “we allow them to go under, we are jeopardizing both the incomes and wealth of that workforce,” said Melissa Boteach, a vice president at National Women’s Law Center. And “the parents who are not going to be able to go back to work or who are going to have to give up their careers or jobs for less pay — because they can’t find the child care to cover the hours that they need — are disproportionately going to be women and women of color.”

Ninety-three percent of child care workers are women, and 45 percent are Black, Asian or Latino, according to Labor Department data. And half of child care businesses are minority-owned. At the same time, Black and Latina mothers are more likely to be the family breadwinners, more likely to hold low-paying jobs, more likely to be considered essential workers, and more likely to live in child care deserts.

Democrats have put forth two proposals that would appropriate more than $60 billion to the industry, which they say are just a starting point. The measures, H.R. 7027 and H.R. 7327, cleared the House Rules Committee Friday and are expected on the floor July 29, lawmakers said. Both include provisions that would give priority to providers serving low-income, “low-supply” and other high-need communities.

The Child Care Is Essential Act, led by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) in the House, would appropriate $50 billion for the establishment of a grant program within the Department of Homeland Security’s Child Care and Development Block Grants that would aid providers that have either remained open or are temporarily closed due to Covid-19. Senate Democrats included identical language in their Coronavirus Child Care and Education Relief Act, S. 4112, which Minority Leader Chuck Schumer advocated for on a press call Tuesday.

The Child Care for Economy Recovery Act, introduced by Democrats in the House Ways and Means and Appropriations committees last month, would take a broader look at rescuing the industry — creating and expanding tax cuts, in addition to appropriating $10 billion for a new grant program for states to improve their child care infrastructure.

“When you look at the impact on providers and providers of color, and women of color who are parents looking for jobs, we really created a perfect storm,” said Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), vice chair of the Democratic caucus and a sponsor of both bills.

Separately, Schumer on Thursday released a plan to aid communities of color, which would include $135 billion for child care, health care and job training. And the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, rolled out a $750 billion proposal Tuesday that would bolster the industry, including by providing free preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds, building new child care facilities, and creating tax credits for informal caregivers.

Republicans agree the industry needs help. A group of 41 GOP House members sent a letter to leadership Thursday calling for “additional, targeted support.” But they’re likely to pursue a different approach than Democrats, as well as a lower level of funding.

“I do want additional dollars going toward child care,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who unveiled a Senate GOP proposal last week. But “we simply, as a nation, can’t do another $3-plus trillion package.”

Top Republicans including Senate HELP Chair Lamar Alexander of Tennessee are behind Ernst’s plan, which would create a grant program that would give up to nine months of financial assistance to child care providers for coverage of coronavirus-related expenses. It would also offer technical aid to help a diversity of providers access the program.

Though the bill appropriates no new money to the industry, Ernst and Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) offered a resolution in May proposing that the next coronavirus relief package include $25 billion for the Child Care and Block Development Grant program. They’re still pushing for that funding, Ernst told POLITICO, and the grant program “could be a subset” of that.

Democrats slammed the proposal for not providing enough.

“To say â€we’re going to pass something without a dime in it’ is really not an approach that is workable,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top ranking Democrat on the HELP Committee and sponsor of S. 4112, as well as the Senate companion to H.R. 7027. Even $25 billion “is not enough to address this crisis.”

It’s unclear what middle ground the parties will reach. But it looks like the package will include significantly higher levels of investment in child care than previous legislation. The CARES Act appropriated $3.5 billion to the Child Care and Block Development Grant program, while the HEROES Act — the House-passed Democratic proposal for the next round of aid — would appropriate $7 billion.

The Trump administration has remained mostly mute on the topic, focusing more on reopening schools.

“We obviously do want more child care providers,” Brooke Rollins, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, said at a POLITICO eventThursday. “There’s no doubt that is an issue that will remain a priority for this White House.” But “we’ve also been very clear that we believe that schools need to reopen.”

Economists say that even pre-pandemic, the industry was stretched thin, operating on minuscule margins and accessible mainly to the wealthiest — and whitest — communities.

“Covid has poured salt in those wounds,” Elise Gould, an economist with the Economic Policy Center, said. “It’s not just out of reach, it’s unavailable.”

These pre-existing weaknesses, combined with the increasing number of schools that have announced they will not be opening come fall, signal the need for an immediate response.

“Child care providers have been pushed to the brink, and they’re going to start closing,” Katie Hamm, a vice president at the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress, said. “We’re hitting a crescendo on this where if Congress doesn’t do something, it’s all going to come crashing down.”

This blog originally appeared at Politico on July 21, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Eleanor Mueller is a legislative reporter for POLITICO Pro, covering policy passing through Congress. She also authors Day Ahead, POLITICO Pro’s daily newsletter rounding up Capitol Hill goings-on.


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Service + Solidarity Spotlight: Keeping Kids Safe Never Stops

Posted on by Aaron Gallant
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Working people across the United States have stepped up to help out our friends, neighbors and communities during these trying times. In our regular Service + Solidarity Spotlight series, we’ll showcase one of those stories every day. Here’s today’s story.

Colorado AFL-CIO President Josette Jaramillo (AFSCME) is a lead caseworker for the Department of Social Services in Pueblo County, Colorado. For Jaramillo, work never stopped when COVID-19 hit. The pandemic only makes it harder to protect the foster children she helps. “We really try hard to meet the kids where they’re at,” she said. “Caseworkers all around the country are on the front lines.” Learn more about how foster care children and social services have been affected during these dangerous times.

This blog originally appeared at AFL-CIO on July 20, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Aaron Gallant is an AFL-CIO contributor.


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Coronavirus is a childcare crisis that could wipe out women’s progress toward equality

Posted on by Laura Clawson
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The coronavirus pandemic has hit working parents hard, and when I say working parents, I mean mostly working mothers. Unemployment is high for everyone, but it’s worse for women than for men, and women are more likely to have left the labor market or to be thinking about quitting their jobs. Relatedly, the brunt of caring for children suddenly at home all day every day is falling on women.

The childcare industry, meanwhile, is suffering, putting more than 325,000 people—overwhelmingly women, and nearly half Black, Asian, or Latino—out of work since February. If childcare centers go out of business, as threatens to happen without government help, then those women’s jobs remain gone, and other women’s ability to work is threatened by the disproportionate amount of child care they end up shouldering. The case for a major government funding program could not be clearer, but somehow it hasn’t happened.

Democrats have introduced a $50 billion aid bill in both the House and the Senate, but a month later, childcare workers and centers along with parents who need child care are all still waiting on that. The CARES Act directed some money to Child Care and Development Block Grants and to Head Start, and the HEROES Act would send more to Child Care and Development Block Grants, but that would still leave out much of the industry. And while childcare providers are theoretically eligible for the Paycheck Protection Program, many haven’t been able to get those loans and the program doesn’t meet their needs in any case.

Even some congressional Republicans—mostly women—recognize the need for some kind of action. Sens. Joni Ernst and Kelly Loeffler (both of them facing challenging elections this fall) have proposed $25 billion for childcare providers. And Rep. Jackie Walorski recently explained the issue very clearly. 

If childcare centers shut down, “parents in all industries will be unable to go back to work, significantly slowing our own economic recovery,” she said. That means â€śChildcare is exactly the type of smart investment we should be prioritizing as we safely reopen and rebuild America’s economy.”

While Congress drags its feet, largely but not entirely thanks to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, women are bearing an immense burden. For women in two-income families, it’s one kind of burden—that of trying to do paid work while taking on the lion’s share of child care as well. There are some toweringly shitty men out there, but this is a structural issue, not just a question of individual relationships. As much of an emergency as this is for women in two-income families, though, â€śin families headed by single mothers, there’s often simply no one else to take on the responsibility,” Prism’s Ashton Lattimore wrote last month. “That makes childcare availability all the more critical, especially for mothers of color like Cecilia, who is Mexican American, as women of color are more likely to be their household’s primary earner or a co-breadwinner.”

Virtually everyone is struggling in the pandemic, but child care shows us how unevenly the challenges fall. Women are hit harder than men. Black women and other women of color are hit harder than white women. And if it doesn’t get fixed, the consequences will be dire. “We need to stabilize the childcare system or we won’t have a robust economic recovery,” said Rep. Suzanne Bonamici. “Not getting this stuff in place will mean women will be the ones who are more likely to have to stay home,” said the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz—and if women who have previously worked are pushed to stay home while hundreds of thousands of jobs disappear from an industry dominated by women and with many many Black, Asian, and Latina workers, decades of efforts toward equality get wiped out.

This blog originally appeared at Daily Kos on June 25, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson has been a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006. Full-time staff since 2011, currently assistant managing editor.


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A lack of child care is keeping women on unemployment rolls

Posted on by Megan Cassella
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Women’s participation in the workforce — which is closely tied to access to child care — has dropped at a faster clip than men’s since the early spring.

A lack of safe and affordable child care amid the coronavirus pandemic is keeping many working parents from returning to the office as more companies call employees back to their jobs — threatening to extend the economic crisis and erode decades of gains for women in the workplace.

The U.S. is experiencing its highest levels of unemployment since the Great Depression, even as businesses begin to reopen. More than 20 million American workers are receiving jobless benefits. Another 1.48 million applied for jobless aid last week, the Department of Labor said Thursday.

The burden is disproportionately falling on women, who are more likely to have been laid off, to have left the labor market or to be considering quitting their jobs so they can manage family responsibilities, Labor Department data, academic research and surveys show.

And the problem is on track to only get worse: Continued shutdowns and the need to implement costly safety and social distancing measures are threatening to run so many child care providers out of business that the country could permanently lose an estimated half of its capacity. Between February and April of this year, more than 1 in 3 jobs in child day care services had been erasedbefore the industry began to recover slightly in May, according to Labor Department data.

Left unaddressed, the issue will affect tens of millions of Americans. More than 325,000 child care workers have already lost their jobs since February. And more than 33 million American families have children under the age of 18. In nearly two-thirds of married-couple families with kids, both parents were working as of last year.

President Donald Trump compounded the crisis when he issued an executive order on Monday restricting certain types of foreign worker visas, including J visas used by au pairs, teachers and camp counselors.

Now, economists and industry experts are calling on Congress to funnel billions of dollars into child care, arguing that doing so would have the double-barreled benefit of providing jobs for workers in the industry while allowing working parents to return to the office. That in turn, they say, would leave everyone with more income to spend in their communities — thus accelerating the recovery.

“If you don’t fund this one, many other industries are going to pay a hidden price,” said Art Rolnick, the former director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and an expert on child development and social policy.

“You won’t find a better stimulant than this industry,” he added. “That money will get spent, and it will get multiplied in the neighborhood.”

In March, as the pandemic was just getting under way, the unemployment rate for both adult men and women was 4 percent. Two months later, that rate jumped up by 7.6 percentage points for men, but nearly 10 percentage points for women.

Women’s participation in the workforce — which is closely tied to access to child care — has also dropped at a faster clip than men’s since the early spring. While 61 percent of men over the age of 20 were employed in May, less than half of women were, the data show.

“We still live in a world where women shoulder more of the responsibilities for care work,” said Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Labor Department. “Not getting this stuff in place will mean women will be the ones who are more likely to have to stay home.”

Within the child care industry, too, a staggering 93 percent of jobs are held by women, according to Labor Department data, and 45.3 percent are Black, Asian or Latino. Making sure the sector stays afloat — or even strengthens — could have an outsized impact on the economic well-being of those demographics.

“It’ll be crucial that that investment is made so that these are actually decent jobs for the people who are holding them,” said Shierholz, now policy director at the Economic Policy Institute.

More than 100 economists wrote an open letter to Congress this week highlighting the need for at least $50 billion in aid for the child care industry, calling it “an essential precondition for a successful economic recovery.” Congressional Democrats have been pushing the same idea since late May, when Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) introduced the Child Care Is Essential Act.

“This is a crisis,” DeLauro said. “This is not unlike a manufacturing crisis, an airline crisis, all of the other things that are out there.”

“If you cannot make families feel that their kids are going to be safe and secure, in a safe environment, in a learning environment, we’re not going to get our economy back on track,” she said.

DeLauro’s bill would appropriate $50 billion for grants that help child care providers affected by the coronavirus pandemic cover their expenses. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) is the lead sponsor of the Senate version.

It’s a level of investment that would be significantly higher than what Congress has previously considered: The CARES Act appropriated $3.5 billion for Child Care and Development Block Grants, as well as $750 million for the Head Start program. The HEROES Act, the House-passed Democratic proposal for the next round of aid, would appropriate $7 billion for Child Care and Development Block Grants.

“We know that’s not enough,” Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), a co-sponsor of the bill, said. “We need to stabilize the child care system or we won’t have a robust economic recovery.”

“It is a piece — of course, we need to continue with testing and physical distancing and all those other things — but for people going back to work, these are really long-term ramifications if we don’t address this.”

The issue has gained more prominence in recent weeks as every state begins to reopen its doors and Congress continues to debate how best to get employees back to work quickly and safely. Forty-one state and local chambers of commerce called on lawmakers earlier this month to include targeted assistance to child care centers as part of its next coronavirus response package.

Five Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have written to the Treasury Department and Small Business Administration to ask for clear guidance ensuring that child care providers have access to loans under the Paycheck Protection Program, the government-backed emergency program for small businesses. They cited one analysis showing that family child care homes were seeing an approval rate of roughly 25 percent.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has also pledged that the issue “will get very big attention” and that when it comes to the economic recovery and women’s participation in the workforce, child care is “key to it all.”

But the effort will need bipartisan support to be successful, and it remains unclear whether Republicans are willing to sign on.

Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia offered a resolution last month proposing that the next coronavirus relief package include $25 billion for child care providers. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who chairs the committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said this week that he would support sending tens of billions of dollars to aid schools and colleges, acknowledging that doing so would help parents and the economy. But he did not comment on child care specifically, and his office did not respond to a request for comment.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans have said they want to continue monitoring economic conditions and CARES Act spending before they make decisions on what further stimulus aid might be needed.

In the House, Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, said on a recent press call with reporters that child care is “an important part of returning to work” and that he would be willing to discuss with Democrats how to maximize the number of child care facilities that can remain open.

At a Ways and Means subcommittee hearing Tuesday focused on the issue, Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) went a step further, saying that the forced shutdown of a large portion of child care providers across the country would mean “parents in all industries will be unable to go back to work, significantly slowing our own economic recovery.”

“Child care is exactly the type of smart investment we should be prioritizing as we safely reopen and rebuild America’s economy,” Walorski said.

This blog originally appeared at Politico on June 25, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Megan Cassella is a trade reporter for POLITICO Pro. Before joining the trade team in June 2016, Megan worked for Reuters based out of Washington, covering the economy, domestic politics and the 2016 presidential campaign. It was in that role that she first began covering trade, including Donald Trump’s rise as the populist candidate vowing to renegotiate NAFTA and Hillary Clinton’s careful sidestep of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

About the Author: Eleanor Mueller is a legislative reporter for POLITICO Pro, covering policy passing through Congress. She also authors Day Ahead, POLITICO Pro’s daily newsletter rounding up Capitol Hill goings-on.


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Parents are ready to return to work, but where will their kids go?

Posted on by Katy Murphy
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The resurgence of California’s economy — the fifth largest in the world — could rest on one sector shattered by the pandemic: child care.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The resurgence of California’s economy — the fifth largest in the world — could rest on one sector in particular that’s been shattered by the pandemic: child care.

Steep revenue losses and costly new health and safety requirements are putting beleaguered child care programs out of existence in the high-cost state just as more parents return to the workplace. Even a relatively small percentage of closures could have an outsize effect given pre-pandemic shortages, experts say.

That could sideline workers and hamper recovery efforts, particularly in California’s signature tourism, entertainment and dining sectors where remote work is simply not possible. States across the country are experiencing the same challenge as more parents are ready to return to work but may have few options for their children.

“I really feel like we can’t reopen the economy until we open our child care centers, and I would extend that to K-12 as well,” said California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, who ran an early education nonprofit before entering politics.

In sectors such as leisure and hospitality, as well as many jobs in health care, construction and manufacturing, “there is very little ability to work from home and be able to juggle your hours around child care,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

The situation also has a disproportionate effect on women, she said, who remain more likely to assume the burden of caring for children and elders, even if they work outside the home.

Further complicating the child care equation is the K-12 school system, which educates some 6 million children in California. The state Department of Education suggested last week that schools could reopen for as few as two days a week to maintain smaller group sizes and social distancing.

The availability of before- and after-school programs will be critical, said Rachel Michelin, president of the California Retailers Association. “If that doesn’t happen, it’s going to be a mess because that really provided a lot of affordable child care for a lot of folks,” she said.

The CARES Act provided an additional $3.5 billion to help child care programs weather the pandemic, of which California received $350 million. Some child care centers also managed to receive federal aid under the Paycheck Protection Program, buying them time to figure out a plan. But advocates say more is needed from Washington, along the lines of a new, $50 billion proposal from Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).

“The airlines got a huge subsidy,” said Eric Sonnenfeld of the Tulare County Office of Education, which runs 22 early childhood education programs in the heart of California’s Central Valley. “We’re looking to something of the same degree.”

In California, 72 percent of home-based day cares surveyed in late April reported they had remained open through the pandemic, caring for children of essential workers, according to a late April poll of child care providers by the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. 

But just 34 percent of the state’s licensed centers — which, combined, have roughly twice the capacity as home-based providers — kept their doors open this spring, it found.

Those reductions came on top of widespread closures of campus-based child care for school-age children as California districts ended physical classes in mid-March.

California on Friday allowed a wide array of sectors to reopen, which is sure to increase demand for child care. But centers that closed abruptly in March are figuring out if, when and how to reopen with cohorts of just 10 children, as the CDC has recommended. In many cases, that’s half the number of children that once shared a classroom. 

Like K-12 schools, child care centers face a difficult choice to maintain social distancing, especially in a recession. They could hire more staff and acquire additional space. Or they could reduce their enrollment. Both come with cost pressures, either through greater expenses or lower revenues, in a sector that historically has operated on the thinnest of margins.

Programs across the country are in the same precarious position as they try to adapt to the costly new requirements, said Beth Bye, a former Connecticut state senator who now leads that state’s Office of Early Childhood.

“The economic model doesn’t work that well,” Bye said of child care programs generally. “Now you take a business that was barely holding on and say, ‘You can take half as many kids.’ The math just doesn’t work.”

Sonnenfeld says he has been getting calls from Tulare County parents, wondering when they can once again send their kids to his county’s state preschool and Head Start programs. He still doesn’t have a firm answer.

“Businesses are reopening, restaurants are reopening, retail is reopening again,” he said, “but our county superintendent has been very adamant that it has to be safe — not only for students, but for staff — to return.”

While many regions will lack enough child care to meet demand, some providers say they can’t easily replace long-enrolled families choosing to stay home.

In addition to the continuing spread of the virus — and a lack of data on the transmission of Covid-19 by asymptomatic children — is a problem of reliable demand: Some parents might keep their children home as a health precaution or because they’re out of work. 

Yessika Magdaleno stayed open when the pandemic hit, caring for the children of nurses, fast food workers and grocery store employees at her home in the Orange County city of Garden Grove. But earlier this month she said nine of the 16 children who had been in her care before the pandemic had not returned. 

“I don’t know after June how we’re going to survive if more than half of my children are not here,” she said. 

Some parents haven’t even heard from their children’s programs amid the chaos of the pandemic, said Mary Ignatius, a longtime organizer for Parent Voices, a parent-led organizing effort. 

“Just figuring out who’s going to be open when everything goes ‘back to normal’ is going to be a test,” Ignatius said. “I think that’s been a lingering pit in every parent’s stomach: ‘I don’t know what is going to happen. I don’t know what this new normal is going to look like.'”

In California, child care has some important allies in the Legislature, including Rendon (D-Lakewood). He said he first met Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), now the state Senate’s budget chair, 20 years ago at a rally for early education funding. 

Legislative leaders rejected Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to cut reimbursement rates for state-subsidized child care by 10 percent, a move the governor himself would cancel if federal leaders provide budget relief. Assemblymember Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento) called that cut “a nonstarter,” saying in an interview that it would “be a death knell for a lot of these programs.”

Newsom in April waived certain eligibility restrictions for state child care assistance to help essential workers who may not have previously qualified for subsidies. He also introduced an online portal to help connect families with child care, Mychildcare.ca.gov, that allows parents to search for child care facilities by ZIP code, including hundreds of new “pop-up” centers the state established in response to the pandemic.

Several lawmakers, anticipating child care challenges, are advancing bills to expand job-protected leave for working parents who need to stay home and care for their children, arguing that parents shouldn’t be forced to choose between their children’s safety and keeping their jobs.

Rendon said he worries about the effect on children’s development if they stay home from school much longer. Hand-washing and other health protocols have long been embedded in child care programs, he said, making them better positioned than other settings to open with proper precautions. 

Still, he said, “People are still quite scared. And to drop off your child, that’s a tremendous leap of faith.”

This blog originally appeared at Politico on June 11, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Katy Murphy covers consumer regulations with a focus on data privacy for POLITICO California. Before joining the team, she was a one-woman Capitol bureau for the The Mercury News and East Bay Times and previously covered K-12 and higher education for more than a decade, based in the Bay Area.


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