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Dear Friend,
Hope is here. We have a window of opportunity to raise our voices together to make real, necessary, urgently needed change. And we hope YOU can take a quick moment to help right now.
Why? The pandemic has laid bare the devastating economic and personal costs of our country’s failure to invest in care or have a care infrastructure. Families have been left to shoulder the burden of caregiving and working, often double and triple shifts, without common-sense protections like universal paid leave, access to child care and home and community-based services for people with disabilities and aging adults - and through this all, people working as child care educators and care providers have been underpaid and without workplace protections like paid leave too.
Women and moms, and disproportionately women and moms of color, have taken the most responsibility for caring for our kids, our sick family members, our aging relatives and neighbors and supporting the people in our lives with disabilities; all while sacrificing our own careers and wellbeing in the process. We have become child care providers, at-home educators, home health aids, and personal care professionals - and we’re done all of that without the critical support we need to make ends meet for ourselves and their families. And, we have lost the most jobs.
Our insufficient care programs, the people working in them, and families across the nation were hanging by a thread when the pandemic began; and now that thread has unraveled altogether. It’s on us to push now to build a real care infrastructure that will endure long after the pandemic is over in order to lift our economy and our families, and to create and sustain good jobs.
Your voice can make the difference.
The numbers are stark and show the cost of decades of inaction: In the past year, 32% of women aged 25 - 34 were pushed out of the labor force due to a lack of child care, proving how essential a strong care infrastructure is to the U.S. job market. In 2020, more than 2.3 million women [1] lost their jobs —over 600,000 are Black; 618,000 are Latina.
Those in the caregiving workforce — 31% of whom are Black women [2] — have been on the front lines of the pandemic without adequate pay [3] or support and have experienced disproportionate health and economic harm. Today, many caregiving professionals live in poverty, with median annual earnings of about $20,000 for home health aides, $21,920 for personal care aides, and $13,558 for nannies, and cannot afford to care for their own families. We need to ensure that caregivers are paid well, and the minimum wage is raised to at least $15 per hour for everyone including tipped workers. We also need to provide a pathway to citizenship for essential workers who have been on the front lines of fighting COVID and providing care for children, people with disabilities and aging adults, and make permanent enhancements to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit so care workers no longer are forced to live below the poverty line.
It’s long past time for our nation to make a significant investment in care! The upcoming federal recovery package must include significant investments in America's care infrastructure. It must build comprehensive child care and early education programs, include paid family and medical leave, and home and community-based services for people with disabilities and aging adults.
The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the U.S. caregiving infrastructure, which relied heavily on women leaving the workforce to stay home or provide paid care, demonstrates that an investment in the country’s caregiving workforce and care infrastructure would create millions of jobs, while enabling parents and family caregivers to return to the workforce.
Robust investment in the care economy would create millions of new jobs [4] for the women hit hardest by this crisis, generate hundreds of billions of dollars in economic activity [5] , and allow millions of women who have been pushed out of the labor force to return. With home health aides and personal care assistants being the third and fourth fastest growing occupations in the United States, investing a benchmark of $77.5 billion per year would support over two million new jobs. Over 10 years, this translates to 22.5 million jobs. And that doesn't even include the moms who have been pushed out of the labor force and will be able to get back to work, or the family caregivers who can increase their work hours once affordable care options are available. Investing in the care economy is both job creating and also job enabling.
To create jobs, lift families, and boost our economy, the federal recovery package must include:
The cost of inaction is too great. Decades of underinvestment is what made the pandemic so disastrous for our communities. And it’s costing not only women, moms, and disproportionately women of color and their families, but our economy overall. For example, “the risk of mothers leaving the labor force and reducing work hours in order to assume caretaking responsibilities amounts to $64.5 billion per year in lost wages and economic activity.” [6]
Now more than ever, people and leaders are starting to realize just how important women, moms, and a care infrastructure are to our entire economy -- and that’s why Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell recently raised the importance of building a care infrastructure to lift our entire national economy. [7]
Just like we need to build bridges to drive on to go to work, we need to build a care infrastructure so parents can go to work, people with disabilities and aging adults can get the care they need with dignity in their communities, children and families can thrive, and child workers have sustainable jobs that pay a living wage.
*Please join us in raising your voice for change. After you sign on, forward this email to your friends and family, post the action link on your social media accounts, and stay engaged. The more of us who raise our voices, the faster change will happen.
Thank you for being part of an unstoppable force for good in our nation!
- Amber, Aryan, Beatriz, Beth, Casey, Christina, Claudia, Diarra, Diana, Donna, dream, Elyssa, Felicia, Gloria, Hanna, Jessica, Jordan, Joy, Julia, Karen, Keisha, Kelle, Kristin, Linda, Lisa, Lucrecer, Maggie, Marysol, Monifa, Nadia, Nancy, Nate, Nina, Ruby, Ruth, Sara, Shanette, Sheila, Sili, Sue Anne, Tasmiha, Taylor, Tina, Tola, and Xochitl
P.S. Want to have some big fun and make real change with homemade art? Draw a picture of a kite on a piece of paper (Family members, kids & friends can do this together!), put the hashtag #CareCantWait on it, take a picture with your cell phone camera -- and post it to your social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) with the hashtag #CareCantWait. *You can also download this printable coloring page of a kite to use: https://action.momsrising.org/go/69737?t=11&akid=14945%2E2840598%2EM4K-P2
Through this kite project we will send this message to Congress: Building a Care Infrastructure will make our families, economy, jobs, businesses and nation soar! #CareCantWait. The kite symbolizes the lifting up and soaring of our communities.
P.P.S. The #CareCareWait coalition is led by many organizations working together, including Caring Across Generations; Center for Law and Social Policy; Closing the Women's Wealth Gap; CLASP; Community Change & Economic Security Project Community Change; Family Values @ Work; MomsRising; National Domestic Workers Alliance; National Partnership for Women & Families; National Women's Law Center; Paid Leave For All; Service Employees International Union (SEIU); The Arc; TIMES UP; and Zero To Three.
References:
[1] PDF: THE PANDEMIC, THE ECONOMY, & THE VALUE OF WOMEN’S WORK
[2] It’s Time to Care: The Economic Case for Investing in a Care Infrastructure
[3] PDF: Undervalued: A Brief History of Women’s Care Work and Child Care Policy in the United States
[4] It’s Time to Care: The Economic Case for Investing in a Care Infrastructure
[5] It’s Time to Care: The Economic Case for Investing in a Care Infrastructure
[6] How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward: Congress’ $64.5 Billion Mistake
[7] Powell Says Better Child Care Policies Might Lift Women in Work Force
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