Caregiving Crisis: We're sooo close to paid leave.
Everyone in society will need paid leave at some point. Is this thing getting passed? Also, this issue is shorter than normal because the start of school was delayed. 🤦♀️
This issue is sponsored by CareForce: the driving force in reimagining how we care. Bringing together builders, storytellers, funders and leaders to create the infrastructure of care we all need for the 21st century. Learn more here.
Hey everyone,
Well, we made it to September. Schools are opening. Some of them. (Not my kid’s. Not this week.)1 Variants are surging. Kids and teachers are getting exposed to COVID-19. Classes are quarantining. (Not my kid’s. Not yet.) I’ve been talking to many parents and parents who are teachers, and the feeling seems to be universal: we are all jumping into the unknown. Again.
Gulp.
I’m terrified. I’m hearing stories already: a friend’s son had his first day of kindergarten only to get a call later that night, yep he was exposed and now must quarantine. I’m stocking up on KN95 masks for my 6-year-old2. (And anxiously tracking shipping status.) This week we tried the latest shipment on at the dinner table like it was one of those fancy sequin flippy shirts, with oohs and aaahs.
I’m trying to microdose relief wherever I can. Om.
I’m also trying to get in the right frame of mind. Throughout this crisis, I keep coming back to the fact that there’s a silver lining: all of these problems are out in the open now. We have a better shot of getting solutions than we ever did before. This is our chance to reshape caregiving infrastructure and make it better for us now, and for future generations.
One of these moonshots just got closer to reality: paid leave. This week paid leave advocates say history was made. The House Ways & Means Committee took up paid leave within Biden's Build Back Better Act, setting the stage to establishing universal paid family and medical leave. It now goes to the Budget committee. 🤞
Paid family and medical leave has so many implications: for individuals, families, generations, the economy. Even babies’ brain development.
Below we talk to Vicki Shabo, one of the country's leading experts on gender equity and work. She is steeped in the fight for paid family and medical leave. I was privileged to speak with her recently and I’m excited to share her insights with you all. (TLDR; it's time. We all need it. We have work to do.)
Please learn up and, if you’re inclined, take some action. (Don’t worry, we’ll make it as easy as possible for you. We know your plate is beyond full.)
Also, this is a special issue because it’s the first one where we’ve officially partnered with the CareForce. I met Vicki and many others like her, who are at the forefront of the push for policy and societal change, through the CareForce. You see their members out talking and quoted more often than you can count. I’m excited to elevate their work — our work! — to you all over coming issues.
Thanks for being here and welcome to our new joiners, many of which are coming from CareForce. If this is your first visit, welcome. Read more about why I started this newsletter. Subscribe below. Have a caregiving story or know someone who does? Please message me for inclusion in a future issue. Hang in there and see you soon.
What To Know About the Caregiving Crisis This Week
NEWS WATCH: ROUNDUP — Keeping tabs on legislation, regulation and conversation:
LET'S RECAP PAID LEAVE — The 'markup' in the House Ways and Means Committee is complete. Note there aren't really any stories to share on this... big news but didn't register with media. The bill moves through the process now (read Vicki Shabo's insights below). What types of infrastructure are we looking it? Per a summary by committee chairman Richard Neal (D-MA):
Providing up to 12 weeks of universal paid family and medical leave for all U.S. workers.
Investing in child care access and equity by equipping parents and caregivers to make childcare decisions, fund the construction and remodeling of facilities, raise wages of child care workers, who earn a median wage of $12.24 an hour and often live in poverty.
Other efforts will improve elder health by expanding Medicare coverage, protecting elderly and people with disabilities in nursing homes via elder justice programs, addressing staffing shortages and more.
ABORTION RESTRICTIONS MEAN FINANCIAL HARDSHIP, POVERTY — Texas' six-week abortion ban is likely to have repercussions beyond reproduction. The 19th looks at implications of the new law by talking to the expert who conducted a study that found economic wellbeing can plummet when people don't have access to abortion care.
"I think the people who passed this law did not consider the harm they are doing to women and their families,” said Diana Greene Foster. “It is just such a massive intrusion into people’s lives and it has real consequences.”
Foster's "Turnaway Study" looked at 1,000 women seeking an abortion, some who received the care and others who were denied it. The majority of the people who took part were low wage to begin with, but the "economic trajectories" of the groups split further when babies were born. Women denied care fell deeper below the federal poverty level, and took about four years to catch up to the levels of employment of women who received an abortion. Some 72% of the women who didn't get an abortion ended up living in poverty, compared with 55% of those who did.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ECONOMIC REPORTING FOCUSES ON PEOPLE? — The 19th and reporters like Chabeli Carrazana are doing vital, much needed work to illustrate the economic implications of these very real social policies. This reporting “is explicitly, unapologetically, boldly intersectional — an approach that necessarily changes the way you approach a story, and the sort of stories that end up getting told,” as Anne Helen Petersen wrote recently in her Culture Study newsletter. She spoke with Chabeli about her work and asked the question “What happens when you center people providing the labor instead of ‘the economy?’” The interview is a great read and gets to the heart of what is missing from so many other media outlets and why The 19th’s work is so important.
“Reporting in this way has changed everything about how I work, what I look for, my voice as a writer. I’m surprised I didn’t do it more before,” Chabeli said. “Suddenly you realize that gender and race are the story and if we don’t recognize the role they have, then we are missing the point.”
UNPAID LABOR DAY — Have a good Labor Day? For many people, especially caregivers, there is no such thing as a day off. Not counting the unpaid labor of caregivers undermines female labor force participation and lowers economic productivity. We’re missing out on a significant force, experts say, to the tune of $1.5 trillion in the U.S. a year. The St. Louis Fed puts it in context: “U.S. women's unpaid labor basically equals the state GDP of New York.” Members of the CareForce took to social media this past week to draw attention:
Bottom line: We’ll let Reshma Saujani, founder of the Marshall Plan for Moms and Girls Who Code, sum it up this week. She published an op-ed in CNN this week as a call to action to moms everywhere, asking people to meet America's 'newest union-in-the making.' There is no union dedicated to protecting moms. She says that should change.
"Let's harness the grit and optimism we put into caring for others to create better conditions for ourselves. Let's galvanize, strategize and organize together to turn this moment of crisis into an opportunity to rebuild our society with equity."
PAID LEAVE: DEEP DIVE — What’s most striking to Vicki Shabo about paid leave is that fact that everyone everywhere could need it at some point. Shabo is the Senior Fellow, Paid Leave Policy and Strategy at the Better Life Lab of New America. Access to paid leave is unequal3, unequitable and it’s holding all of us back. Given all the momentum around it in Washington, let’s talk about the need for it, why it seems so hard to achieve in the U.S. and what we can do to make sure this crisis means we get it. Here are edited excerpts from my discussion with Vicki.
CC: Why is paid leave so important?
VS: There are a few reasons you might need it: whether you're caring for a child in the happiest and newest of times, you're caring for a family member who's dealing with a serious health issue or disability, whether addressing military families, deployment or injured, whether you're dealing with your own own health issue. It's critical both to the health and financial security of, at some point in somebody's working life, like literally every household in America.
I'm continually struck by the fact that this one policy is literally the one thing that could touch everybody at some point. Decades of research from states and from employer policies and international experience shows the critically important links between access to paid time to care for yourself or a loved one, and outcomes: to reduce healthcare costs, improve labor force attachment, particularly for women and other caregivers, greater engagement of men in the lives of their children, for families, less reliance on public assistance, greater retirement security, less turnover for businesses, more productivity for businesses, and you know, if a successful paid leave program were implemented, returns for GDP overall.
CC: How is the U.S. economy being held back by the lack of paid leave?
VS: The cost of doing nothing is the right question. So we have fewer women in the labor force, we have women who are stepping back on work, or taking/refusing promotions or taking lower paid jobs, caregivers who are retiring early, because they need to care for their own aging parents. Businesses are seeing turnover costs that can be up to 400% of a worker's annual salary, or even 16% of annual salary even for our lowest paid worker. We're just not reaching our full potential in any way as individuals, families, communities, businesses or the economy, with the status quo.
CC: How does the lack of paid leave exacerbate inequities already baked into society?
VS: Both gender and racial and ethnic disparities, access to paid leave, occupational segregation, the cost of Black and brown people in lower wage jobs -- all perpetuate the disparities that exist in access to paid leave, access to flexible work schedules, the capacity to care, the ability to afford childcare.
You have this sort of perfect storm where the very people who need access to care supports the most are least likely to have them. That is detrimental to those individuals for sure, but again, this has repercussions and ripple effects throughout the economy as well. Historical systemic sexism and racism has played a role in the access to benefits, access to workers, or in worker protections that have led to vastly unequal circumstances when it comes to the ability to provide or receive care for yourself or your loved one.
CC: Paid leave is not novel. Pretty much every other country has it. What makes it so difficult to achieve in the U.S.?
VS: We have a couple of things sort of working against us.
- One is this myth of individualism and 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps', which historians and political scientists have really traced back to organized business lobby engagement to tear back any sense of a state that helps to care for people in ways that other countries do.
- We have this related idea that employer-employee relationships are individual and not a public concern. We have lower rates of unionization than many other places, and have a cultural ambivalence-slash-hostility to women being full and equal participants in the economy. And I think we can see that with Texas very clearly. But this is another piece of that really misogynistic, sexist, view of role of women that completely disregards the financial realities for families notwithstanding individual women's aspirations.
CC: How are you feeling about the chances of passage and what can we do?
VS: There’s a lot still to be done. There are a lot of priorities across a range of topics: climate, jobs, care, health. What’s most important is that all people push their members of Congress for the biggest possible package. That’s really critically important, connected things. They fit in the package they’re constructing.
These are overdue investments that have needed to be made in jobs, climate, care, health, for decades. This package is the chance to accomplish many of the things that people want and need. So I would not want to leave anybody with the impression that there is nothing to be done. The next month of advocacy is critically, critically important . I definitely encourage people to reach out.
Bottom line: The next few weeks are so important for advocacy, and Vicki says the best way to do that is to contact your representatives in Congress. Paid Leave For All (of which Vicki is an advisory member) makes it so easy. Click here, put in your info and it automatically sends letters to your reps on your behalf. There are also great videos that explain the need for paid leave, if you want to share with your networks. I really appreciate this video by Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures — gets right at the why in a compelling way.
I PLANNED TO SAY MORE BUT THE START OF SCHOOL WAS DELAYED — It was that kind of week. My New Jersey town and nearby areas suffered damage in Tropical Storm Ida (everybody is OK). Sooooooo fingers and curls crossed school actually starts on Monday.
Bottom line: All the parents in my town this week:
Signing off
Thanks, as always, for reading. Please send feedback, your microdosing relief secrets, and ways to convince a singleton 6-year-old to play by himself. If you found value in Caregiving Crisis, please consider sharing with a friend.
Caregiving Crisis is a newsletter written by Emily Fredrix Goodman. We aim to publish every other week but other things may get in the way.
Yes, I continue to write about our schools. Writing is my therapy.
We’ve been using the word ‘mango’ as shorthand for ‘put your mask over your nose NOW.’ Sometimes my voice hurts from yelling about this tropical fruit repeatedly. 🥭😷
Here’s my paid leave story — I celebrated the anniversary of it this week. (Baby is now 6 going on 28.)
I found out I was pregnant with my first and only in between that magical time of accepting a new job and starting at the new job. Seven years ago this week. I was beyond terrified. You can see it in the photo on the left if you look closely enough. Would I qualify for the company’s leave program? Would I qualify for FMLA? I actually did the math to see if I could work the total hours required for one year of work (1,250) in less than one year. I was desperate to do anything I could to get leave to be with my son. I spoke with HR before telling my line manager, bursting into tears because I was so overwhelmed and scared. They assured me I would qualify for their leave program, even if I didn’t have one year of service. (No, they said, I could not work 1,250 hours in 6 months.) I had just over 7 months under my belt before my son was born almost 3 weeks early. I came back to mark my first anniversary with the company, with my chunky four-month-old, as shown on the right. It should not have to be like this. I was enormously privileged to be at a job that had such a generous program and one that applied to employees no matter how long they had worked there. (They actually boosted the paid leave by 6 weeks a few days after my son was born, and I got the full 18 weeks.) What about others who do not have such employers or such access? What decisions are they forced to make to the detriment of themselves and their families? How is society hurt by this uneven access? This is why paid family and medical leave is vital to get everyone the same level of access during the most trying times of their lives. PS - Modern day child says of his baby self: “That’s a faux hawk.” He’s into it.