More Than A Magazine, A Movement
On Sept. 30, Congress let federal childcare stabilization grant funding expire. What happens next?
First, providers will be forced to raise tuition prices to offset the loss of stabilization grants. Then, staffing shortages. Finally, childcare programs—as many as 70,000 by our projections—will have to shut down altogether.
The good news: If Congress can get their act together to fund emergency childcare before the end of the calendar year, they can stem the worst of these consequences.
Passed in January 2021 with the goal of providing COVID-era relief, the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) allocated $39 billion towards childcare programming. The majority—$24 billion—went directly to childcare and daycare centers, to help the programs remain open and staffed. On Sept. 30, that funding expired, and Congress took no action to extend it. Last month, Senate Democrats introduced The Child Care Stabilization Act, a bill to extend childcare stabilization funding for five years. But until the measure gets support from Republicans, it cannot be considered for a vote.
More than 3 million children are projected to lose access to childcare nationwide, and 70,000 childcare programs are likely to close. This will have ripple effects for parents forced out of work or to cut their work hours, for businesses who will lose valuable employees or experience the impact of their employees’ childcare disruptions, and state economies that will lose tax revenue and jobs in the childcare sector as a result.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the 1963 Equal Pay Act and Aug. 15 is Moms’ Equal Pay Day—the day that symbolizes how far into the year a mom must work to earn what men did in the previous calendar year.
An increasing number of mothers, including two-thirds of moms with young children, are breadwinners, and four out of five Black mothers are the sole or primary provider for their households. Yet America’s leaders and laws leave mothers to figure it out on their own—to simply ‘make it work.’ Despite the best efforts of the Biden administration and allies in Congress to invest in caregiving in the wake of the pandemic, every single cent of the care economy investments included in the “Build Back Better” package were left on the cutting room floor.
So what do we do about it?
The combination of the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)—all signed into law by President Biden in the past two years—will create millions of new jobs in the American economy in the months and years ahead. These new industrial policy jobs will be across energy, physical infrastructure, manufacturing, science and technology.
Building care infrastructure into industrial infrastructure is the best way to ensure that these good jobs that have been created have people to work in them. Building a care infrastructure into the new U.S. industrial policy is not only the right thing to do, but also the most strategic.
American families have long been struggling with out-of-reach childcare prices. The tremendous gap between what parents pay, and what early educators earn, is a product of a broken market. It cannot be solved on its own. The federal government must step in with sustainable, long-term investments through reconciliation.
The U.S. has not prioritized childcare. Even before the pandemic, many families could not find childcare when and where they needed it. More than half of all families lived in childcare deserts, and those who didn’t faced exorbitant prices. That’s gotten even worse during the COVID-19 pandemic. For those who can afford childcare, extremely high prices take a toll—many families pay more than mortgage payments or rent for care. It’s unacceptable.
The Build Back Better Act will be a game-changer for parents across the nation, lowering prices and increasing the supply of high-quality care at the same time.
Build Back Better’s provisions to lower childcare costs, improve the quality of early education and increase wages will provide immediate relief to families hit hardest by the pandemic.
The more than 1 million moms still out of the workforce will begin to return to work, and others will be able to increase their hours and earnings.
After a year that has put parents—especially women—through unimaginable strain as they’ve struggled to keep a roof over their families’ heads and care for their children, governors in 24 states now want to rip out the rug from under them by ending state participation in federal pandemic unemployment programs.
Emergency unemployment aid is doing what it is meant to do: serving as a temporary lifeline while workers search for and return to work.
The Biden–Harris administration’s American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan taken together would lay the foundation for building comprehensive child care and early learning, creating greater access to home- and community-based services with a well paid workforce, and paid family and medical leave for everyone that would bolster women’s workforce participation, support healthy child development and learning, ensure people with disabilities can live independently, support aging with dignity, and ensure a flourishing economic future for everyone.
If we do not build out our care infrastructure and open up physical infrastructure jobs to women, we will exclude half of our work force from the opportunities that will shape our economic future, potentially exacerbating and permanently extending the “she-cession” of 2020.
