[Care isn’t a burden for women and families to shoulder alone.
It’s the foundation of our economy, and it deserves to be treated as
such.] [[link removed]]

THIS MOTHER’S DAY, RECOGNIZE THE CARE WORK THAT POWERS OUR ECONOMY
 
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Heidi Shierholz
May 7, 2021
Economic Policy Institute
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_ Care isn’t a burden for women and families to shoulder alone.
It’s the foundation of our economy, and it deserves to be treated as
such. _

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Mother’s Day is, at its core, about care. When we select Hallmark
cards and order flower deliveries, we’re honoring the care provided
by moms and other maternal figures. This Mother’s Day, though, marks
more than a year into a pandemic that threw the disparities in our
care system into stark relief. Women left the workforce in staggering
numbers to attend to COVID-related caregiving responsibilities at
home. This was disruptive for individual families and the economy at
large.

So this year, while of course we should celebrate our mothers,
there’s much more to be done. Honoring our caregivers goes beyond
individual gestures; it calls for a sweeping investment in care
workers and services.

Care isn’t a burden for women and families to shoulder alone. It’s
the foundation of our economy, and it deserves to be treated as such.
For the tens of millions of workers with care responsibilities related
to, for example, young children or elderly parents, having stable,
high-quality care services available is what makes it possible for
them to hold a job. Put simply, care services are needed for the
functioning of our modern labor market.

Workers with care responsibilities need a strong care system in place
in order to participate in the workforce. As it stands, our care
infrastructure is fragmented and inadequate, which cuts off
opportunities for millions of workers. The burdens of our inadequate
care infrastructure disproportionately fall on women
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still perform the bulk of care work in this country. Those care
burdens are a primary cause
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labor force participation among prime age women in the U.S. relative
to our peer countries around the world, even before the pandemic. Poor
care infrastructure comes at great economic costs.

While workers with caregiving needs rely heavily on care services,
care jobs are historically underpaid and undervalued. And because of
things like occupational segregation, discrimination, and other labor
market disparities related to structural racism and sexism, women and
people of color are concentrated in these jobs.

More than 90%
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care jobs are held by women and over half are held by women of color.
Further, care workers typically only earn around $16,000 a year
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are often without the choice to join a union, and are far more likely
to live in poverty or near-poverty than other workers. Investing in
home- and community-based care services, and making sure care jobs are
good, union jobs that pay a living wage, is an important way to create
more racial and gender equity in the economy.

The need for care jobs is growing rapidly and inevitably. Almost one
in five
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new jobs created over the next decade are projected to be either home
health aides or personal care aides. That means that even without
investments to make them good jobs, care jobs will exist in immense
numbers. The people in these jobs will be almost all women, and they
will be majority women of color. Without investments to make them
good, union jobs, a huge share of the people in these jobs will earn
poverty or near-poverty wages—exacerbating race, gender, and income
inequality.

Investing in our care system isn’t only about race and gender
parity. A down payment on care workers and infrastructure also serves
as a jobs creator during periods of weakness in the labor market. And
because home care jobs require relatively little in the way of
equipment and materials, investments in home- and community-based care
generate on the order of _twice_
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many jobs as investments in physical infrastructure like roads and
bridges.

The finding that investments in care infrastructure generate roughly
twice as many jobs as investments in physical infrastructure takes
into account not just “direct” jobs created but also
“indirect” jobs created in supplier industries, related service
sectors and_ _in “respending” jobs. In other words, when we
create good care jobs with decent wages for a majority women of color
workforce, we create not only those jobs but also the opportunity for
more jobs as care workers put their paychecks back into the community.

We are beginning to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis that made it
impossible to take care work for granted. We have a crucial
opportunity right now to make investments in our care
infrastructure—long-run investments in the quality of care of our
loved ones and opportunities for workers at all income levels to be
able to work because they have stable, high-quality care for the
people in their lives who need it.

While we celebrate all the mothers and caregivers this year, let’s
take the opportunity to think bigger, too. It’s time for bold,
structural solutions to recognize that care work is real work that
powers our economy. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to
transform the lives of care workers and families across the country.

_Heidi Shierholz [[link removed]] leads
EPI’s policy team, which monitors wage and employment policies
coming out of Congress and the administration and advances a
worker-first policy agenda. Throughout her career, Shierholz has
educated policymakers, journalists, and the public about the effects
of economic policies on low- and middle-income families._

_The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think
tank created in 1986 to include the needs of low- and middle-income
workers in economic policy discussions. EPI believes every working
person deserves a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, and
retirement security. To achieve this goal, EPI conducts research and
analysis on the economic status of working America. EPI proposes
public policies that protect and improve the economic conditions of
low- and middle-income workers and assesses policies with respect to
how they affect those workers._

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