John Hersey
This intersection, in all economies, leaves workers who provide these most intimate of personal care services—to nurse the young, cook and clean for adults, and care for the elderly—outside the bounds of work regulations and social protections. In the United States, it was the work of slaves and immigrants, more recently still the work of African Americans and newly arrived immigrants, and always a workforce dominated by women—though for the wealthiest, “prestige” required Black male chauffeurs or butlers, or in California a male Japanese gardener. By virtue of their status, these workers were deliberately excluded for issues of race, gender, and class from the New Deal–era protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Social Security Act (including its provisions for unemployment insurance), and the Wagner Act. Changes in our economy and advances of the civil rights movement repaired some of the earlier damage to care workers, but as we’ve seen in the coronavirus crisis, the changes were not enough.
The integral role of the care economy is ignored by the consensus of economic policymakers. Because the non-market activity of care is ignored by the gross domestic product, it goes unmeasured and is marginalized (for example, when it is done off the books by those who are undocumented or still in the shadows) and buried in some residual of activity. No thought goes into this critical sector when arguing for economic stimulus.
Further, the care economy is the ultimate in “trickle down” economics, since the market activity is commanded by the privileged at the top of the economy to purchase the services of those at the bottom of the economy. To the extent the care economy makes it into the discourse at all—in discussions of how prohibitively expensive child care has become, for example—it tends to center on the problem that when a service is dependent on the rich to provide the market, the price is out of reach of those in the middle. So, while we acknowledge the advantages to women’s labor force participation from having the help of the care economy, the debate focuses on delivering those same services to the middle class at lower cost. Too often, this does not translate into broad public support, but instead ways to reduce costs through deregulation of services or labor standards, pitting middle-class women against those further down the income scale. Even the more progressive discussion that calls for broad public support too often leads with “pathways” and “training,” not so subtly accepting the low wages and labor standards of the care industries, and demanding of care workers that they continue to earn low wages until they can prove themselves worthy of decent working conditions and livable standards.
For all women, one of the biggest components of their gender wage gap is derived from care worker wages being set low.
The coronavirus has made these fault lines crystal clear: the disparities in who is exposed to the disease because they continue to provide care to the elderly, and who is unemployed and outside the safety net because social distancing has shuttered their job opportunities. The death toll in elder care facilities has been staggering and, considering our national outrage during the Vietnam War at loss of life, callous to the extreme, because this death toll was far larger. On the job loss side, in the child care industry alone about 66 percent of jobs were lost from February to April, dipping to an employment low of 668,000. Those workers were dumped onto unemployment rolls that mushroomed because of our poor planning compared to other industrial nations, which protected payrolls when they shut industries. Policymakers had to scramble to deliver relief to these quickly disemployed populations, because in a normal economy fewer than 8 percent of unemployed workers in low-wage service industries get unemployment benefits, a number made low because of the persistence of issues when they were initially excluded from the New Deal worker protection framework.
With school-age children now sheltered in place and learning at home, the broader discussion and appreciation for the central role of social production in our economy is front and center. Thanks to the Progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the education of our children, a central role of the care economy, has been fully measured as part of our GDP. What happens to cafeteria workers, bus drivers, school crossing guards, and teaching aides is fully measured, and their loss of jobs is not off the books, but visible and borne by our safety nets. Many of those workers are in unions and can exercise their voice, at work and in shaping policy. And women, as caregivers, have been left to struggle with a growing set of responsibilities pushed back into their laps.
This would be a great moment to once and for all have society recognize the necessity of the care economy. Pulled from the shadows in the pandemic, we can all recognize the positive externality of its production. As with all goods with positive externalities, the government must boost the price through all means to increase quality and quantity. Boosting the price begins with boosting the wages and working conditions of the care workers. For all women, one of the biggest components of their gender wage gap is derived from care worker wages being set low. Undervaluing the social production women do “for free” reduces the reservation wage for women generally. This low set of wages in female-dominant occupations is in large measure because of the low shadow price of care.
This is also key for the racial wage gap. The majority of Black workers are female. Lost in the shuffle and misdirection of American race dynamics has been that Black women have always had a much higher labor force participation rate than white women; despite having much higher unemployment rates, a higher share of Black women are employed. Amidst the idiocy of claims of “welfare queens” who bred and reproduced laziness, it has always been the challenge for Black women to fill the obvious strain of providing adequate social-production functions in the Black community, while working so many more hours than white women outside the home, where care service is provided. The intersection of race and class similarly created a layer of jobs held by Black men in personal services (landscaping, doormen, porters) that pull down the earnings of the Hispanic men who took over this work, and still haunt some Black men.
So, in this moment, to build back a better economy, let’s take the obvious first step and fully protect all workers, especially domestic workers, with the full breadth and weight of the law. We can raise the minimum wage on a path to $15 an hour and provide all Fair Labor Standards Act and Social Security Act protections for all workers (no exceptions). We can modernize our unemployment insurance system to cover all workers, and not just average-wage, full-time workers—read: male workers. We can give all workers paid leave and sick days, like other advanced economies. We can grant all workers the rights to organize and bargain collectively, including adopting a domestic workers’ “bill of rights.” And we can pass meaningful equal-pay laws. In short, we can pass laws that respect the work of all women, accord all women equal rights with men who work, and afford equal protection to all work. We now have studies showing that during the COVID crisis, unionized nursing care facilities suffered fewer deaths and less spread of the disease, showing us that empowering workers is something we all benefit from.
The second step is to finally recognize the necessity of the care economy and social production. We do that by implementing paid paternity and family leave (like all industrial nations) and by using government support to fully cover early-childhood and quality child care (like other advanced economies). The unconscionable level of deaths in nursing homes and the current pressures of nursing homes to expel low-income patients highlight the need for expanded, consistent, quality care for late life. As our nation’s demography changes, a rising share of seniors will be people of color with no wealth. Our current elder care problems will show a deeper crisis level if we do not act now to set up a better system of elder care.
The hypocrisy that we celebrated white women who stayed home to do care work, but castigated Black women on welfare, is rooted in the race and class divide that in the end denigrated all care work. Let us put care work fully into the monetized portion of the GDP, so we value it. Hopefully, it is now clear to everyone how much easier it would have been to manage this crisis if we had a fair value on the cost of care. These policies would have made handling this crisis easier. It would have made our economy more equal, and therefore less fragile. Correcting these errors has proven too costly, only made palatable because of the much bigger costs we would have incurred by even more loss of life, but for social distancing.
