If none of those locations pay above minimum wage many may not only be taking a pay cut vs unemployment but also need to find transport, childcare, and give up putting that time into their homes/families. It's summer and without vaccinations for those under 16 childcare is rough or hugely expensive.
It's not the same, but around here people list a 5x/week dog walk at $60/hour (what?!). I'm not sure what they are earning to validate that expense but even at half that hourly cost I would save more money quitting my job than sending even one kid to childcare during work hours.
It's a policy failure. Government should've paid a parent to stay home and provide childcare for their kids until under 5s could be vaccinated, instead of what we have now, which is a broken, dysfunctional childcare system attempting to keep itself together (and failing, both due to wages being too low to make the work worthwhile, spread of COVID, etc).
I don't know how you convince anyone in the current environment to be a childcare provider or teacher, when there are robust alternative employment options available that pay more for a better work environment.
It's not a good situation because they all require fairly large sacrifices, but there are alternatives to paid childcare. I work with a developer who's taking care of a 1 and 3-year-old during working hours because the pandemic caused his and many other daycares in in our area to close and there's simply no availability right now anywhere else. He's absent a lot during the day, but he makes it to all the important meetings and spends a significant amount of time working in the evening after his wife comes home from her job, so overall puts in the same amount of work as before. He has no life whatsoever outside of working and taking care of his kids, but no outside care involved.
They are looking really hard for available daycare.
>Even a minimum wage job should cover the cost of day care for their youngest child, who is too young for full-time schooling.
In many markets, no it won't, if you can even find a daycare with an opening.
Anyway, this plan sounds like a net negative for the family unless the job can cover daycare PLUS commuting costs, work wardrobe, increased food costs (less time to cook from scratch), and the hassle involved with finding alternate care when any of the four kids are sick.
Some people consider the "humanity value" of having a parent at home to care for children to be worth the financial downside. That's their choice. By the way, most developed nations agree...
From the New Republic:
*Among developed nations, the U.S. is now the only one that doesn’t guarantee some kind of paid employee leave available for new parents." http://bit.ly/2pZ03Ay
I would point out that for many people the cost of paying for childcare during work hours is comparable to the income generated from said work. Those people have essentially no incentive to work unless they want to avoid their kids.
If you have kids, not paying for childcare can save you tens of thousands of dollars per year.
Or perhaps you now have the option of moving to a cheaper city, or further from your former workplace. That could easily be a double-digit percentage savings from your budget.
EDIT: And, uh...there are tons of service jobs in my city. Haven't you heard the endless whining from business owners that "nobody wants to work anymore"? They're struggling to fill openings.
Exactly right. People also forget that while the parent works 8 hours a day, the kid is dropped off before and after commute time which means the kid may be in daycare for 9 or 10 hours. So if you get infant care at $175/week for four infants divided by 50 hours, you get $14/hour and that is gross revenue to the business. If you happen to lose an infant to a parental move, now you are losing money for that class. You can do better on the 10+ kids because the ratios are much better.
As you said, we are valuing time more and more. I can't imagine what childcare would costs with a $15/hour minimum wage. A lot of mothers would probably be forced to give up their job.
You can’t just magically have enough childcare workers willing to staff that abundance of childcare centers. It’s a free job market, and wages have to be competitive, given a tight labor market. We help run a preschool at the moment, and salaries are the vast majority of the budget, the facility is a very small part. It’s extremely hard to keep it staffed without blowing the budget.
If you want childcare to be cheaper for parents it must be subsidized, or we need higher unemployment to make childcare a more attractive field (though I’d argue you don’t want people caring for your kids out of desperation for a job), or we must make housing cheaper/less competitive so that people can afford to do this out of passion.
Leaving work for childcare is currently a valid reason to go on unemployment. They should try to work this out with one of their employers. They could each go down to 50% time and pay and be supplemented by unemployment currently. There is a lot of flexibility they aren't taking advantage of and then complaining about how hard it is.
It is really easy to get stuck in retail or foodservice, and these jobs aren't known for paying a lot.
Children need childcare. This has a major impact on your finances if you are poor. You might need to have a reduced availability and might not find full time - or any - work because of it. If your child is prone to being sick and you make less money, it becomes easier to lose your job when you have to stay home with them. And childcare is expensive: I've known plenty of folks that stayed home or have worked little simply because they didn't actually make money by working, once they factored in child care and transportation costs.
And that's not even getting into something mentioned in the article: Sometimes, when you make more, you are actually worse off. People refuse full time hours, raises, and promotions because the increased pay won't cover the government help they'll lose, let alone make them better off.
Being articulate and well spoken doesn't really grant you anything when you are working bad jobs (and many 'decent), depending on the job. I worked a couple of days in a food factory back in the late 90's. It was barely over minimum wage. Being articulate didn't matter: You just needed to do the work fast enough and follow the health guidelines fast enough. Oh, and work mandatory OT on short notice.
Hopefully if there were more choices for childcare the costs would fall.
I know that childcare in many parts of America, and the UK, can eat up a whole parent's salary. Here in Finland we pay €250/month for Monday-Friday daycare 7:30-4:30. That's affordable, and means two parents can easily continue to work.
If you pay $1500/month for child-care it becomes a tougher choice to send your child/children there. I know people in the UK where lesser-earning parent has been persuaded to quit their job, because it was "cheaper" than paying for childcare.
The money is not the only factor that can make it a wash. The practicalities of where suitable day care is located and the hours they operate mean that for many people returning to work just isn't an option, even if you can afford it. My wife worked freelance in TV before having our daughter. The unsociable hours alone meant that it was going to be unlikely she could return to work, despite being desperate to work again. Add the fact that no local childcare is able to offer 5 days a week without a year or more's notice. Then add the fact that her salary would pay only about 50% of the childcare costs. Add the fact that my own work + commute means I'd never be able to drop off or pick up my daughter in time. It doesn't add up. Maybe we need to move country :)
Daycare was already expensive, know plenty of people myself included who are no longer doing it because they work from home. None the less because of COVID protocols meant less space in the daycare. Daycare really needs to be subsidized so costs can come down without totally screwing employees.
Childcare lobby doesn't pay enough for that. All joking aside, I wonder if some people had one of those near-death experiences during the pandemic and realized wasting the only life you have slaving away at some dump for chump change wasn't a great path to be on.
It's what happened with my family. In 2019, we fostered my gf's sisters' kids in addition to our own 2. My gf was forced to stop working because there were no daycare slots available for the toddler, and then when COVID hit, we weren't about to send the kids to any of the daycares we could afford because of how crowded they all were.
Now it's a year and a half after the first big panic, half of the daycares are shut down, and the rest of them are overcrowded. Those who were left without jobs at daycares either took unemployment or were able to find better paying jobs (because literally nothing pays worse than a daycare teacher's salary... even in a Dallas suburb the starting pay was $8.35 - $10 an hour at most daycares). Raising prices would force a lot of kids out of daycare, so most daycare owners would rather run understaffed facilities than pay their people a fair wage.
The entire childcare system is convoluted and broken from top to bottom, and it's usually the mothers who are expected to put their careers on hold when there's an issue. In our case, it made sense because I make about 4x what my gf does and she's pursuing a degree. For many others, it's probably a serious drag on the entire family.
No idea how people have more than one kid... at least in the bay area. I have one kid and the cheapest decent childcare I've found costs about $30k/year, and is only approx. half time. It ends at ~2pm, and is closed all summer and about one week per month on average. It's been a huge struggle to keep a career going under these circumstances.
Even at prices and hours like this, there are year long wait lists for spots in these. I've several times had to take my kid out of childcare (kicked out, or they went out of business) and had to hire a nanny full time for 6 mo to 1 year before I could find another childcare spot. At the time I was paying 110% of my take home income to have a nanny despite having a PhD in a high demand field, burning through my savings with hopes of finding another childcare spot without ending my career. Not sure how anyone else does this.
As of now, I WFH while watching my son alone about half of the hours, which is really hard. I feel like I am not giving him the attention he deserves, and it's really hard to focus.
that's not a very satisfying answer. The ones doing labor aren't benefitting, and a day care cares for more than 4 kids. so where's all the money going? Rent? So tiring hearing all these arguments in politics thinking of the kids, and meanwhile the kids' facilities are screwed over the worst.
and for a high CoL area, it's not even 1200 a month. It's more like 2500-3000. Literally a 2nd apartment's worth of rent. Unless things went down over the pandemic.
It's not the same, but around here people list a 5x/week dog walk at $60/hour (what?!). I'm not sure what they are earning to validate that expense but even at half that hourly cost I would save more money quitting my job than sending even one kid to childcare during work hours.
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