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Two Policies at the Core of Biden’s Agenda

John Micek on

“Among women, certain subgroups were particularly impacted, including women of color, those with lower levels of education, and those in low-wage jobs,” the report found.

Women also comprised two-thirds of the essential workforce, and were “key to providing vital infrastructure services and helping to keep the economy running during the pandemic.

“The pandemic also hit mothers especially hard, with approximately one million mothers leaving the workforce nationwide, compared to half that number of fathers,” the document continued. “Mothers without partners had the sharpest drop in employment among parents. In one survey, 82 percent of mothers leaving the workforce reported that they could not afford to do so.”

Families who were already struggling to seek childcare during the pandemic have seen that search complicated by a staffing crisis within the childcare industry, the report found.

In Pennsylvania, 86 percent of child care providers closed at some point during the pandemic, and at least 850 have closed permanently, the report found.

A further 350 providers have remained temporarily shuttered since March 2020. And while 600 new providers have opened during that same time period, they have been run at a reduced capacity, limiting access to care, the report found

The access crisis has further been complicated by an affordability crisis as well, with the average annual cost of ‘center-based’ infant care in Pennsylvania running to about $11,560, which is close to the $14,770 average cost of public college tuition and fees, according to the report.

Again, that reflects nationwide trends.

A survey by the National Association for the Education of Young Children concluded that four in five daycare centers nationwide are understaffed, and more than three-quarters of them (78 percent) said low wages were the main reason they had trouble finding new employees, CBS News reported this week.

 

And the economic cost of that crisis is real. Citing a study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the report found that the crisis had resulted in an “annual loss of $3.47 billion in tax revenue and to employers’ bottom line due to employee absences and turnover. COVID-19 has likely increased these costs.”

And that was just in Pennsylvania.

The report calls on policymakers to expand access to affordable, quality childcare, with state officials leveraging all available federal childcare and pandemic relief funds to prop up the current system and to prevent more shutdowns.

In the long-term, the report calls for state and federal officials to “approve additional recurring investments in the child care sector to address systemic issues like low staff wages, inadequate reimbursement rates for providers participating in the subsidized child care program, and a shortage of high-quality care.”

It’s all well and good to tell American workers that they have to go back to the office. But unless policy-makers back that up with actual action by approving funding for expanded and affordable child care, such talk is meaningless.

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Copyright 2021 John L. Micek, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

An award-winning political journalist, John L. Micek is Editor-in-Chief of The Pennsylvania Capital-Star in Harrisburg, Pa. Email him at jmicek@penncapital-star.com and follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek.


Copyright 2021 John Micek, All Rights Reserved. Credit: Cagle.com

 

 

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