November 25, 2019 The Nation. 17
it universal, free child care. Not only is this an issue that
affects millions of families, but the expense has also made
good care an often unreachable luxury. According to the
Washington Center for Equitable Growth, the average
cost of licensed infant child care is $1,230 per month,
which is almost a fifth of the US median family monthly
income. In over 50 percent of states, one year of care for
infants outside the home costs more than the average
yearly cost of public college tuition. In the past decade,
the cost of child care has increased by nearly 25 percent,
while real wages have roughly stayed the same.
In an interview with Refinery29, political science pro-
fessor Marissa Martino Golden notes that after welfare
policy changes in the 1990s, many low-income women
tried to enter the workforce but found they had few
options when it came to taking care of their kids. “That
forced them to use either lower-quality care providers or
child care that was not reliable. If child care was not avail-
able one day, [these women] would likely be fired from
their jobs,” she says. Things aren’t any better today: Ac-
cording to a new study by the center, parents in the retail
and food service sector (which accounts for 17 percent
of jobs in the US economy) are often required to work
variable shifts and so must depend on “more numerous
care arrangements,” including a “reliance on informal
care,” such as “children [being asked] to provide care for
themselves and for their siblings.”
“I think expanding access to child care...is one of the
best economic policies you can put in place,” says Kate
Bahn, an economist at the center. This offers workers
The family
wage is
no longer
even an
aspirational
norm; these
days, every-
body has
to work, and
too many
struggle to
get by with-
out even a
living wage.greater security, and “when we treat these workers well,
it also affects the quality of child care, which improves
outcomes for the children receiving that care—a long-
term positive effect.”
Bahn adds that universal child care would stimulate
demand in the event of a recession. “If we believe that
having a child care program will benefit both child care
workers and those who currently pay for the care, the
program is really targeting those [who] have a higher
marginal propensity to consume. In other words, they
will spend the money that they now have because of this
universal program,” she says.
There is a large constituency for such a policy: all of
the families affected by the care crisis (fewer than one
in three children in the United States have a full-time,
stay-at-home parent today) and people (mostly women)
working in the sector. What’s more, there are about
2 million domestic workers in the United States, the
majority of them immigrant women and women of color,
and 1.2 million child care workers. Properly organized
child care would also create unionized jobs in a category
that is notorious for its exploitation of immigrant wom-
en, who are in a weak position to fight for higher wages.
At our next moment of crisis, we should demand free
universal child care, a policy that would not only provide
a powerful boost to the economy but also transform the
way Americans view care work and labor. Eventually,
care would come to be seen as a necessary task for soci-
ety to invest in, not a private responsibility hidden from
political life. Q