The work that makes work possible

By Anne-Marie Slaughter, member of UN Women's Global Civil Society Advisory Group, with contributions from UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Care.com's Sheila Lirio Marcelo and Caring Across Generations' Ai-jen Poo

Whether it’s childcare, elder care, or self-care, caregiving plays a central role in keeping America’s economy going. As baby boomers continue to age and Millennials continue to become parents, America’s care needs are only increasing. In fact, caregiving is projected to be the largest occupation in the U.S. by 2020, with care-sector jobs growing five times faster than other large job sectors. Sixty per cent of families do not have a stay-at-home parent, and almost 70 per cent of mothers and over 90 per cent of fathers are in the workforce.

With those numbers, the labour of caregivers—the majority of whom are women of colour, often immigrant women—clearly enables vast percentages of economic productivity in the U.S., without compensation or benefits to acknowledge its value. A survey by the National Domestic Workers Alliance found that 65 per cent of domestic workers don’t have health insurance and only 4 per cent have employer-provided insurance coverage. Less than 2 per cent of domestic workers receive retirement or pension funds from their primary employers, and fewer than 9 per cent work for employers who pay into Social Security.

With little choice but to exist in a broken system, caregivers consistently trade long-term security for short-term financial gain. And those gains aren’t much to speak of. If, as in the current system, the average caregiver makes $9 an hour (compared to a golf caddy at $17 and a Whole Foods bag handler at $19) and 50 percent of low-wage informal childcare and homecare workers rely on public assistance, who will cover the costs when they themselves start to raise families or age into retirement?

Care can in fact be a national priority with an infrastructure to match—it’s happened before. Back in the 1940s, when women’s labour was key to the U.S. war effort, the U.S. government funded childcare centers under the Lanham Act. These provided universal and affordable care for children under 12 for up to six days a week at centers that offered a low student-teacher ratio, meals, and enrichment activities.

Today, the Pentagon continues to be a leader on this in some ways, subsidizing on-site daycare for military families. And there is a growing global recognition of the need for care infrastructure. As outlined by UN Women in a policy brief on gender equality, child development, and job creation, Ecuador’s central government, working with local governments and civil-society organizations, has coordinated community-based childcare services for children of hundreds of thousands of working parents. As part of a broader strategy to universalize access and improve quality, the government plans to create another 1,000 centers by 2017, has recruited a growing number of early childhood professionals to coordinate service provision, and childcare workers—who can now obtain a technical degree after three years of part-time study—receive the minimum wage and full social-security benefits.

Another significant part of the problem of valuing care is the prevalence and invisibility of unpaid care work in the U.S. and abroad, which makes acknowledging and tracking data about this labor as a measurement of both economic growth and gender equality a key solution. The UN Women’s “Progress of the World’s Women Report” acknowledges, “Domestic work makes all other work possible”—and this is true regardless of whether that work comes from domestic workers or unpaid family caregivers. The labor of domestic workers is critical to the function and growth of national and global economies.