Child Care in Crisis: A Call for Waged and Unwaged Workers to Unite.

by Katy Slininger

Last spring, I was a new mother working as an infant teacher at a private daycare in Connecticut. I was paid poverty wages and offered only a few weeks of unpaid maternity leave and no other benefits—not even complimentary care for my own infant in my own classroom. Managers refused to accomodate my state-protected right to pump, resulting in my inability to produce breast milk for the baby and my reliance on state assistance for formula. Coworkers often complained that the owner and director of the facility doctored their time cards to avoid overtime pay. We were underpaid, forced to buy our own materials, and commonly harassed over text to show up for last-minute shifts.

In March, as the pandemic spread and enrollment in daycares dropped, I was laid off. For care workers who didn't lose their jobs, conditions declined further. At another nearby daycare, teachers were forced to come in while sick due to staffing shortages, while management was apathetic about enforcing social distancing and mask wearing among students. One worker told me that she was exposed to teachers with Covid, but was not permitted to quarantine because they were moving around the classroom and avoided what qualified as 'sustained contact.' When a parent complained to the Department of Public Health, the report was closed after a call to the director instead of in-person investigation. Just as the owners of private childcare facilities often failed to provide working families with quality child care prior to the pandemic, their dedication to safety and education has declined as parents' desperation increased.

Working class women have borne the brunt of staggering unemployment, unsustainable levels of unpaid labor at home, and disproportionate exposure to the Covid-19 virus in high-risk positions. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics released their December report at the end of last year, it revealed the shocking loss of 156,000 jobs—almost all of which were held by women of color. Over four million women have lost jobs since the beginning of the pandemic, thirty-two percent of which dropped out of the workforce in order to care for families as safe childcare options dwindled. Compounding crises are pushing the limits of parents' and children's mental and physical well-being.

The public response to this "she-cession" ranges from neglect at the state and federal level to the scapegoating of unionized teachers for trapping women at home and slowing economic recovery. Media coverage has framed the gendered job loss and home labor crisis as erasing decades of progress previously marked by equitable employment rates.

While the disproportionate suffering of working women during the pandemic is very real, the narrative of progress lost ignores a complicated history. Economic participation required the outsourcing of formerly unpaid reproductive work—like elder care, child care, and home maintenance—to lower-class workers long before the pandemic. The formation of a class of waged carers, composed of politically- and economically-disenfranchised women of color and immigrant women, heightened inequality within the working class. Middle- and upper-class families accumulated wealth through multiple incomes and reduced conflict over housework, while domestic workers earned poverty wages and shouldered the cost of their own outsourced home labor.

High-income families were not the only ones relying on the labor of professional carers before the pandemic. The decreasing value of stagnant wages has forced most families to send additional members into the workforce, increasing the demand for child care and other waged domestic work. Whether by choice or economic necessity, increased workforce participation has been far from liberatory for women. Those pursuing careers by choice left the home only to find themselves in a workplace subject to the undemocratic rule by management. With the exception of a minority of high-wage workers, they joined the rest of the working class in being denied adequate family leave, living wages, or control over their own conditions. All while waged carers, filling the labor gaps at home, became an even more vulnerable, underpaid class of women.

In private, atomized childcare centers with small profit margins, owners focus on increasing enrollment at the expense of student and teacher well-being. Staffing ratios are violated, training is an afterthought, new teachers are thrown into classrooms before background checks are completed, and classroom resources are scarce. I've personally witnessed my daycare director ignore cases of neglect and abuse when turnover rates are particularly high. These poor working and learning conditions are a direct result of the economic system's resistance to professionalizing early childhood education in order to suppress wages.

Policy that fails to address and correct the material conditions of low-income and minority women who perform care work, and uses their exploited labor as a panacea for economic recovery, cannot be the solution to the economic crisis. The Biden administration's relief package earmarks billions to bail out childcare providers and assist families with tuition, with no mandate for increasing teacher wages or improved treatment of workers.

Support for unionization and professionalization of early childhood educators needs to be foundational to the post-Covid recovery. Daycare centers could be publicly run and funded, instead of individually bailed out without accountability to parents and teachers. Higher wages are necessary for lifting care workers out of poverty, but also begins the process of reducing turnover and professionalizing the industry. Only properly trained and compensated teachers have the resources and power to resolve underlying issues of neglect and abuse.

Families that suffered to maintain the impossible balance of work and children through the past year need to transform their struggles into solidarity with returning childcare professionals and teachers, as our well-being is intertwined. The crisis of care could be the "reset button for social organization" that also empowers and compensates previously invisible, unpaid reproductive workers in the home—if working families are willing to struggle together.

Katy Slininger is a mother, sometimes-writer, and former daycare worker living in rural Connecticut.

AdminFebruary 10, 2021