For most of her career, Briana would pay family members to watch her kids, but lining up schedules can be very complicated and inconsistent. She also tried traditional day care, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. Between dropping her kids off at day care and driving to and from her job site, she was late to work every day and unable to work enough overtime hours to offset the day care costs, especially given that day care center had a hard stop, while her job did not.
She tried taking turns staying home with the father of her children, a fellow ironworker, but all that did was make them both miss out on earning pension credits determined by the number of hours worked. It all came to a head in the past two months and Briana joined the millions of women who left the workforce – unable to pursue the family-sustaining career she’s been working so hard for, for nearly a decade.
Stories like Briana’s are familiar to families around the country. And as the White House and Senate negotiators flesh out an infrastructure plan, it’s precisely workers like her who are at risk of being left out of the improvements the plan has promised. A significant investment in care, including affordable access to high-quality child and elder care, would reach every American. But leaving behind that support would stunt the economic growth infrastructure spending could provide.
It is critical to invest in care at the same time as we invest in bridges and broadband. The infrastructure plan outlined by the White House this week is significant and holds a lot of promise for our economy. But without another corresponding bill that addresses the care infrastructure workers like Briana count on to be able to do their jobs, that promise will come up short.
We can’t expect an equitable recovery without addressing the lack of child care, home- and community-based services and paid leave that pushed millions of women out of the workforce and devastated their families’ financial security. Individuals, corporations, philanthropies and “the market” cannot solve this crisis. We need significant investment, especially at the federal level, to build an economy that works for all of us. Right now, we should be worried about spending too little, not too much.
The path forward to shared prosperity is through public investment in infrastructure in all its forms. Expanding access to child and elder care while keeping costs affordable and paying the workers who provide it equitably will require significant federal investment, dollars which would best be spent by expanding home- and community-based services and adopting key provisions of the American Families Plan, including universal child care and universal paid leave. These must remain a top priority for this White House and this Congress if the full benefits of this infrastructure package are to reach every American.
For millions of workers like Briana, this struggle over caregiving is not new. While the pandemic has highlighted the fragility of our country’s care infrastructure, returning to that inequitable and unstable status quo would be a grave disservice to workers, families and the entire economy. We have a rare moment to build a new future for workers and families, and it’s up to Congress and the President to seize it.
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