Women Workers Can Help Rebuild the U.S. Economy--If We Can Solve Their Care Challenges
(a most important and thoughtful read)
Women Workers Can Help Rebuild the U.S. Economy—If We Can Solve Their Care Challenges
5/25/2023 by Suzanne Kahn
It’s time the U.S. fully bring caregivers into the workforce in an equitable way.
U.S. manufacturing is experiencing a rebound, with companies adding workers amid high consumer demand for products. The rebound is largely a product of the pandemic recession and recovery. (Nitat Termmee / Getty Images)
In February, the Department of Commerce announced that companies seeking $150 million or more under the CHIPS and Science Act would have to guarantee the availability of high-quality childcare for workers. While women’s rights and care advocates celebrated the move, others argued it was a distraction from the real goal of the CHIPS Act. The Department of Commerce defended this built-in childcare requirement, arguing it was essential to grow the supply of workers available to new factories. This acknowledgement that the availability of care is essential to many potential workers’ ability to take a job is a welcome change from a century of policies assuming every worker had an unpaid caregiver at home handling any care responsibilities. But, it’s just a start. If we are serious about lessening the effects care responsibilities have on caregivers’—and in particular women’s—workforce participation, we need a more robust suite of policies.
The United States has significantly fewer supports for caregivers than our peer countries. We lack paid family leave and public childcare. Our long-term care infrastructure is a mix of private and public, means-tested programs. Persistent low wages across the care industries have ensured that supply is unstable and insufficient. As a result, families have long been left to patch together care solutions, straining their budgets and their time. Many have had to rely on long stretches of unpaid labor from family members, usually women. The pandemic, of course, exposed the starkness of this situation when care facilities shut down for months.
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3. Create work pathways.
Third, we must recognize that decades of inadequate care infrastructure have led many caregivers to leave the workforce for extended periods that in and of themselves make it difficult for them to return to a job. To bring women fully into the workforce, we must create on-ramps to help those driven out of the workforce return. There is precedent for this. In the 1970s, there were state and federal programs to help “displaced homemakers”—women who had been out of the workforce and then lost their source of economic support through divorce or death of a husband—find jobs and receive workforce training. Something similar might be done today to give women who have been forced out of the workforce by caregiving responsibilities special pathways back into the workforce through newly expanded industrial sectors.
There is an untapped supply of potential workers available to critical industries—if we can solve their care challenges.
Access to care should not be tied to a job, but access to a job is often tied to access to care. When caregivers find themselves without access to care either because care options simply do not exist or because the prices are too high, they may leave the workforce. These interruptions, even if intended to be short, often make it difficult to return to the workforce. The long-term consequences of these care-driven departures from the workforce on individual women have been well documented and help drive a persistent gender wealth gap. One study estimated that women over 50 who exit the workforce for caregiving reasons lose $324,044 in income and benefits over their life. Equally important, there are long-term consequences for the nation’s economy and its ability to grow. At a moment of historically low unemployment, when we are trying to rebuild entire sectors of the economy, it is essential that we build the public care programs needed to support a larger and more stable workforce.
https://msmagazine.com/2023/05/25/women-workers-usa-childcare-family/