US daycare workers quitting due to low pay and lack of benefits

LOW PAY, demanding work and a lack of benefits have driven child-care workers out of the industry for good during the pandemic — creating ripple effects on the rest of the US economy.

Employment in daycare services remains more than 10% below preCOVID levels, compared with just 1% for the labor market at large. LinkedIn data suggest many of these women — early child-care work is almost entirely done by women — moved to other jobs, primarily in education.

Sarah Mallett, 32, is one of them. She worked at an early childhood facility in Maine for almost nine years, struggling to pay her student loans with her hourly wages before ultimately leaving during the pandemic to teach in a public school.

“That was where my heart and soul was,” Mallett said of working with younger kids. “But when we shut down, and we hadn’t been working for three months, that’s when I knew I needed to shift my income and my security and find a way to get benefits.”

Staffing shortages — paired with the thousands of child-care centers that never reopened — leave about 460,000 families struggling to find alternatives, based on Wells Fargo & Co. estimates, keeping some of these parents, especially mothers, out of the labor force. As Wells Fargo economists put it in a note last month: The daycare industry’s challenges are making hiring more difficult and expensive for all sectors.

COVID-19 exacerbated pre-existing shortages in an industry known for its high turnover, causing hundreds of thousands of employees to lose their jobs when daycares shut down. —