New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Child care, not wages, to blame in job numbers
One week ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released employment data for April that placed job growth at about 75 percent lower than the 1 million jobs economists had been anticipating.
The right flank pounced on the “measly 266,000 new job,” pointing to a “growing shortage of available workers,” a situation they blamed on enhanced unemployment benefits, which they characterized as “a perverse incentive not to look for work.”
The left flank pounced back, using the right’s argument as a lever to talk about how wages are too low, employers aren’t willing to pay a living wage and workers are finally reassessing their worth.
As is so often the case, part of me — the grownup analytical trained journalist part — watched it all unfold and thought things like “they’re both a little right and a lot wrong” and “but the numbers are telling a very different story.”
Meanwhile, the working-class girl who grew up Appalachia-adjacent and resides deep in my heart had another thought: “None of these people has ever had a low-wage job, or possibly even met a real-life, honest-to-goodness working-class person.”
I’ve worked as a waitress, a file clerk at a trucking company and a wood stacker at a lumber treatment plant. I was paid next to nothing, sexually harassed and exposed to toxic chemicals, and I still wanted to work. There were years when my mom supported our whole family on her practical nurse’s salary, years when we were eligible for government aid we didn’t apply for. This was not unusual among the working-class families I knew growing up.
Shame on the right for failing, yet again, to stand up for the
“salt of the earth” people they like to claim they represent.
They gave their adversaries a lovely gift with paper and bows and Hallmark cards attached last week when they tipped their hand and made clear how little concern they have for workers.
Shame on the left’s pundit class, too. Instead of unwrapping the gift the right had presented them with, their absurd statements made it clear how little they understand the kinds of calculations the working-poor have to make every day to survive. Some said they hoped workers were using the extra cash for vacations and self-care, as if low-wage workers were using the extra $300 a week to gift themselves a spa day rather than use it to keep up with their rapidly increasing grocery, housing and fuel costs.
As often happens when the never-been-poor talk about the actual poor, the poor girl inside me couldn’t help but murmur, “They have no idea.” Raising the minimum wage is a human rights issue, and makes good economic sense besides. But wages aren’t the primary cause of the “worker shortage.”
So why are we seeing unfilled openings? The answer is right there in the numbers: child care. In March, when a healthy 900,000 jobs were added to the economy, 280,000 came from the hospitality sector. Are we to believe that the same workers who accepted mostly low-wage jobs at restaurants and hotels in March were suddenly too flush with government cash to be enticed by the same offers in April?
Consider that women make up 64 percent of the workforce in the 40 lowest paying industries, including restaurants, and then consider that the loudest whining about lack of workers is coming from low-wage employers. I’d love to say it was because they are paying their workers unconscionably low wages (they are). But the real reason their workers aren’t returning to their posts is because they can’t.
Between February 2020 and February 2021, 2.3 million women left the workforce, and millions more downshifted into part-time work, a mass exit attributable to the disappearance of day-care centers, remote schooling and suspended afterschool programs — not low wages.
What’s more, according to a new study form McKinsey, COVID’s “gender effect” could erase the last six years of progress made by women in their long battle toward equity in pay and representation in corporate leadership roles.
Finally, consider that I had planned to finish this column last night and have it in my editor’s inbox early this morning. Instead, I fell asleep next to my son after a difficult day of remote schooling due to yet another 14-day quarantine triggered by his proximity to someone with a positive COVID test. Like many women in the McKinsey report, I too feel exhausted and like I am “always on,” and I wonder when I will ever be able to say with confidence that I can reliably show up for a full-time job again.
How can any parent seek employment in good faith under these conditions? When an employer asks about your availability, they aren’t necessarily expecting an answer like, “Well, I can probably work during school hours for an indeterminable number of days in a row, interrupted by very probable 14day durations of no work due to quarantine. Will that work for you?”
Companies with women in senior leadership roles are 50 percent more profitable than business who lack women at the highest levels. It’s estimated that labor lost from the millions of women who have left or ratcheted back their contributions to the labor market since February 2020 has already cost $1 trillion in global GDP.
Building a sustainable childcare infrastructure, as outlined in President Biden’s American Families Plan, could add $13 trillion to global GDP by 2030.
Invest in child care or leave $13 trillion on the table? Seems like pretty simple math to me.