Care services are to key to recovery
It is now well-documented that the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis has disproportionately affected women, especially Black, Indigenous, and racialized women, women with disabilities and newcomer and immigrant women. Economist Armine Yalnizyan has called the COVID-19 economic fallout a “she-cession.” The disappearance of jobs in majority-women sectors such as retail meant that in March the decline in employment for women was twice that of men. As the economy reopens, men’s jobs are returning faster than women’s.
Discussion is turning to how we get out of the pandemic-induced recession. We believe the tragic inequities in the impacts of COVID-19 also give us insights into how to achieve a robust recovery.
The pandemic has put the care economy in the spotlight, and investing in this crucial aspect of Canada’s social infrastructure will be at the core of any response to the crisis.
Before the pandemic, women already took on more of the household duties and care of children and elders than men. The closing of schools and care services has exacerbated the gendered division of labour at home. Women are now even more likely to shoulder caregiving burdens, leading 71 per cent of women in Canada to report feeling more overworked and anxious during the pandemic due to unpaid care work.
The economy will face an unnecessarily slow recovery if women who have lost their jobs, or have been forced to leave them due to caregiving duties, cannot return to paid work because of the lack of access to safe, affordable, and highquality care.
We risk undoing decades of work toward women’s economic equality without attention to the resources required to enable their employment.
Yet many non-profit child-care centres are closing down permanently and filing bankruptcy because they have been unable to sustain their activities during the lockdown. At a moment when there was already a historic shortage of affordable child care spots, the problem is only getting worse, not better.
Canada’s historical devaluation of care work has also had terrible repercussions during the pandemic. The inordinate deaths in long-term-care homes has been accelerated in part by underpaid care workers, many of whom are immigrants and asylum seekers unprotected by benefits such as sick leave. They are often forced to work multiple jobs across many facilities to make ends meet and work at a great risk to their own health and well-being.
Supporting social infrastructure for the care economy is vital for an equitable economic recovery, and would require the government to commit to the OECD benchmark of allocating at least 1 per cent of GDP to early learning and child care, creating a national child care secretariat, and increasing the numbers of child care facilities and the wages of the people who work in them.
Any path to recovery must also create an expedited path to permanent resident status for migrant care workers so that they can access health care and worker protections on arrival.
Such a plan would create enormous economic and social benefits. For example, in the United Kingdom, researchers predict that spending 1.9 per cent of GDP in care would generate two million sustainable jobs, raise the employment rate by five per cent, reduce the gender employment gap by four per cent, and reduce the number of families in poverty.
Closer to home, studies show that for each $100 invested by the Quebec government in child care, $104 returned to the provincial government and $43 to the federal government. An investment in care supports not only children and families, but also economic development overall.
Strengthening public investments in care will enable women to return to the paid work they may have had to leave during the pandemic due to heavy caregiving burdens that men have been less likely to take on; add millions of jobs to the economy, particularly for women; support children’s development; and provide significant returns to the economy. Without support for care services, a slowed economic recovery is inevitable.