In response to the ongoing childcare crisis.
The DC Council has approved a program that will
send $10,000 checks to childcare workers.
And this is really good news because there is a child care crisis partly
because childcare workers are sick and tired of being underpaid.
On average they make about $12 an hour and
do need to have specific training and credentials to be childcare workers.
And so they're deciding not getting paid enough for this not worth it.
And because of that turnover because of that shortage
of child care workers, child care expense.
The expense of childcare for parents has gone up tremendously during the pandemic
and I'll get to those numbers in just a moment.
But first a little more detail in regard to this program.
So what they're doing is the council raised taxes.
This very smart.
So the council raised taxes on the city's highest earners last year and
the members voted at that time to set aside $53 million dollars in
the first year of that tax.
To somehow raise the pay of daycare workers saying that their work
was vital to the city's families but
not sufficiently compensated by their current salaries.
And they were right about that.
I love the way that they carried this out.
Hey why don't we raise taxes on the highest earners?
They can afford to pay their fair share.
And we redistribute that money in some way to the childcare workers to make up for
the fact that they're severely underpaid.
Now at the time when they had passed this proposal to raise the taxes on high
earners and and create this $53 million dollar fund.
They didn't know exactly how they were gonna send that money or
get that money to the childcare workers.
Were they going to fund childcare centers and and encourage them to raise wages.
What were they gonna do?
They didn't know.
But now they've decided for
the first year of the program let's just send them $10,000 checks.
And I love it.
I think that's the most efficient way to do this.
I think it's the smartest way to do this.
Just send them the direct checks.
Now.
Child care workers in the DC.
Area would need to apply for them and then the money can be sent to them either in
payments or one lump sum this year to make the workers get the money quickly.
Which I think is really important.
The council is going to give the payment directly to any eligible daycare worker
who applies for it.
Workers who care for babies and toddlers will be eligible for
checks of about 10,000 or even $14,000 depending on
whether they work as assistants or leaders of daycare classrooms.
I absolutely love this.
And look this has been an ongoing crisis.
I mean it was an ongoing crisis prior to the pandemic and
it was further exacerbated during the pandemic.
In fact PBS did a fantastic documentary about this.
That will help you understand the gravity of the issue in more detail.
Let's take a quick look.
>> The pandemic has revealed a lot about the child care system that perhaps people
didn't see before how fragile it is, how low paid the women doing this work are.
But I'm not convinced that people really understand the disparities and
pay gaps that exist in the child care system.
>> More than 90% of childcare workers in the US.
Are women and just under half are people of color.
On average, they earn only $12 an hour, most do not receive benefits and
about half are on public assistance.
>> And so when there is a shortage of workers because they're underpaid and
they're not gonna take it anymore, they might move on to a different career path.
Then there is a short supply of childcare which parents
desperately need in order to go back to work, namely mothers.
And that has been a huge problem during the pandemic since there's a shortage of
childcare options right now, mothers can't pay for the child care,
which means that they can't go back to work.
And so it has a domino effect in the economy.
This next clip explains that in greater detail.
>> A lot of women when asked directly whether or
not childcare was a factor, we found that upwards of 25% of
those who lost their job said it was solely because of childcare.
And even though the economy is recovering many women still can't
return to their jobs.
It's definitely the case that the lack of childcare is holding the economy back from
its full potential.
The degree to which child care is holding us back compared to other factors,
like the lack of vaccination or the spread of the delta variant.
That's really hard to say.
But we do know that the lack of childcare is certainly holding individual
women back and also harming their families in terms of the loss of income.
>> And the incredible thing about all of this is that on one hand, you have
lawmakers, namely GOP lawmakers arguing that we gonna get people back to work.
What's going on?
All right, all these people who haven't gone back to work yet,
what are they doing just sitting on their butts?
Like not wanting to work.
Look at these couch potatoes, look at these bums.
But these are people who don't have very many options when it comes to their
children because we are the only developed nation that absolutely
abandons parents after they give birth.
I mean, we abandon parents before they give birth during pregnancy process,
we don't even really offer much support.
But you can't have a functioning society where on one hand,
you want to force everyone who gets pregnant to carry that pregnancy to term,
that's like the GOP dream.
You want to force those mothers to go back to work.
But you don't want to offer any support in regard to child care.
How does that make any sense?
And then to make matters worse you'll have proposals
from the Federal Government that would require funding, right.
So Biden's build back better agenda tried to tackle childcare but we would need to
raise taxes on the wealthy right in order to pay for those kinds of programs.
But the wealthy meaning the business owners, the executives,
the shareholders, all of those people.
They don't wanna to see their taxes go up but
they want all those workers back at work.
You guys see that tension, that endless conflict in this insane broken system.
What are the kids supposed to do?
What are the mothers supposed to do?
It makes no sense.
So I'm really happy to see that at least on a local level the DC council is
pushing for something that could actually be a fantastic solution.
And not only would it be fantastic in terms of solving a crisis that's ongoing.
But it will be a case study that we can point to in so many different ways.
Look at this raising taxes to ensure that the wealthy pay their fair share.
Can help us fund these programs that help ordinary workers to make life easier so
they can go to work with.
No fuss.
No must not have to worry about where they're gonna put their kids and
what I love is that they're sending the checks directly to the workers.
Do it that way.
That's the best way to do it.
All of these weird like let's go around in circles and maybe we fund this and
then maybe fund that and maybe we give the money to the employer and
just give it to the workers.
Just give it directly to the workers.
They're underpaid.
You know they're underpaid.
Why get a middleman in there?
Just send it directly to the workers and
that's what they're doing at least in the first year of this program.
And I love it.
So some good news out of DC.
Hopefully this kind of thinking takes off and
in other local governments but we'll see about that.