Women are dropping out of the workforce as child care closures continue
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The September jobs report revealed that women continue to be hit hard by the pandemic as child care responsibilities make it difficult for mothers to continue working or return to work.
New York Times reporter Jeanna Smialek wrote that many women dropped out of the workforce entirely in September, as labor force participation dropped to 55.6 percent from 56.1 percent. Aside from April and May of 2020, this marks the lowest reading for women’s labor force participation since 1987.
Smialek writes, “Census Bureau and Minneapolis Fed research suggests mothers have been far more likely than fathers to pull back on work amid the pandemic. About one in five working-age adults said this summer that they were not working was because the pandemic disrupted their child care — and of those not working, women ages 25 to 44 were almost three times as likely as men to be out of a job thanks to child care.”
Economic experts are sounding the alarm. In a recent speech, Thomas Barkin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond said, “As we head into the fall, the challenges of virtual schooling and prolonged child care closures may already be putting downward pressure on women’s participation.”
Over the past few months, we’ve heard from countless early learning and care facilities across the country who, after doing everything possible to stay afloat, have had to make the difficult decision to close their doors for good as a result of the pandemic.
Last week, Hopkins Early Learning Center (HELC) just outside of Minneapolis, MN, informed the families and community they’d served for four decades that they had begun the process of dissolving. Over 115 children are typically enrolled at HELC. Now, their families must find other options at a time when options are few and far between.
The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated America’s already-fragile child care industry. On average, child care providers nationwide are facing a 59% increase in operating costs to keep up with health and safety standards, while enrollment is down over 67% — unsustainable figures for an industry that has always operated on razor-thin margins.
Child care providers have made clear they need financial relief to be able to stay in business through what promises to be an unstable and unpredictable year ahead.
Even school leaders at HELC tried to convince Congress of the dire situation they and others were facing… back in May. Take a look at their message:
While a number of proposals have been introduced in Congress to provide much-needed relief to American families and businesses — including child care providers — leaders have failed to reach a deal in negotiating a final package.
Until they do, more programs like Hopkins Early Learning Center will continue to close. And with every day that passes, the situation becomes increasingly more dire for working parents and the incredible early educators who care for America’s young children.
Learn more about the impact of the nation’s child care crisis at childcarerelief.org.
Urge House Leaders to Prioritize Child Care in COVID Recovery Bill
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Reports indicate House Democrats are working on a new COVID-19 recovery package in hopes of revitalizing negotiations with Senate Republicans and the White House.
It is imperative that your representatives hear from you that child care must be prioritized in the legislation.
The HEROES Act, which passed the House earlier this summer, included $7 billion for child care.
The House later passed the Child Care is Essential Act – $50 billion to stabilize the child care industry – with bipartisan support.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has introduced two recovery packages that included $15 billion for child care.
And the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus released a proposal that also included $15 billion for child care.
Without question, the child care industry will need significantly more than $15 billion for child care if providers are to be able to remain in business through this ongoing economic crisis. And more than 8 in 10 voters favor a federal child care stabilization fund in the COVID-19 recovery package – even up to $50 billion, which many advocates have been requesting all along – with overwhelming support across partisan lines, generations, and genders.
Tell your member of Congress to ensure Nancy Pelosi includes enough funding for child care to prevent the industry from collapse.
Day of Action to #SaveChildCare
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Every Wednesday through the month of September, we’re asking you to join us in urging Congress to #SaveChildCare by ensuring providers receive the emergency stabilization funding they need to remain in business through the recovery – and beyond.
Here’s what you need to know for Wednesday, September 16th:
Did you know that 70% of parents have reported that their child care programs either have closed or are operating at reduced capacity or hours? While some parents have the option to work remotely, 1 in 4 parents cannot return to work in person without child care.
Tweet, call, and email your lawmakers and let them know that this is not sustainable for America’s working parents.
We’ve put together a few social graphics and tweets you can use, along with proposed call script and email language for contacting members of Congress. You can find those in this Google Doc to use throughout the day today. We’ve also created links through the Child Care Relief action center/Social Press Kit to allow for direct tweets, emails and calls to Congress.
Former CEO Calls for Child Care Stabilization to Support The U.S. Workforce
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In a recent op-ed published in the Des Moines Register, Robert J. Myers, the retired chairman and CEO of Casey’s General Stores, wrote about the need to stabilize the child care industry to support the workforce and America’s economic recovery. He wrote that “child care is a critical element of a successful workforce.”
As governors and mayors across the country evaluate public health criteria and data to inform how they reopen the economy, there’s a major data point that must also be considered: the availability of quality and affordable child care.
As the former chairman and CEO of Casey’s General Stores, the challenges around child care are not new to me. Casey’s operates over 2,000 convenience stores across 16 states, counting on more than 37,000 employees. With many employees working non-traditional hours, and a workforce that spans urban and rural settings, the challenges of child care are pervasive and complicated. During my tenure, I was proud to help establish a child development center at our headquarters in Ankeny, Iowa. The center not only provided quality care for the children of many of our employees, but also served as a tool to attract talent and increase retention while boosting morale, performance, and overall success. These results make sense, because child care is a critical element of a successful workforce.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, our American workforce and child care sector have been in turmoil. For months, child care was primarily available to essential workers only. As businesses began to reopen and employees returned to work, many parents were faced with daunting questions about where they could afford to safely send their kids. As school districts now grapple with how schools can operate, we are facing another stress on the child care system. Traditionally, child care primarily serves our youngest kids, but, as K-12 schools operate virtually or students spend reduced time in the classroom, who is caring for those kids when they’re not at school?
Most child care providers are themselves small businesses and serve as a critical workforce support for all businesses, both big and small. Last year, the business-leader group ReadyNation released a report showing that the lack of access to quality child care, just for parents of infants and toddlers, costs the economy $57 billion a year. The health pandemic has put an immense strain on an already-fragile sector, and it’s estimated that one-third to one-half of providers may not reopen at all. For those that do, the reduction in revenue due to required smaller group sizes, coupled with increased costs for additional training and new health and safety standards and equipment, present a formidable challenge.
The CARES Act in April provided relief to child care providers in the form of additional and more flexible Child Care and Development Block Grant dollars and forgivable loans to small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program. While the CARES Act was a critical relief bill, it proved insufficient to meet the unique needs of the child care industry, particularly for home-based providers, which care for the majority of our nation’s children in child care settings. Congress needs to come together to enact a child care stabilization fund. Providers need access to direct grants that will allow them to pay their staff, cover fixed costs, operate with needed safety precautions, and sustain their businesses as parents return to work and school schedules evolve.
While many sectors of our economy have been adversely affected by the pandemic and are looking for relief, every sector also relies on the availability of child care to support their workforce to ensure that our nation’s children have a safe place to thrive.
We all must work together to address this crisis. Child care is essential to our economy, and our nation’s economic recovery depends on it.
Robert J. Myers is the retired chairman and CEO of Casey’s General Stores. He is a member of the ReadyNation CEO Task Force on Early Childhood and resides in Ankeny.
Child Care Providers Experiencing 47% Increase in Operating Expenses Amid Pandemic Crisis
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Home-based providers face 70 percent increase
A new interactive tool created by the Center for American Progress (CAP) estimates the true cost of providing child care that meets pandemic-related state guidelines. Child care is a necessity for working families, yet providers are struggling to stay open due to increased expenses and lower enrollment during the pandemic.
Using the tool, CAP found that, on average, child care providers are facing a 47 percent increase in operating costs during the pandemic, with home-based family child care providers facing a 70 percent increase. Driving this increase are personnel costs and the increased spending on sanitation supplies:
Personnel Costs: Personnel costs remained at the same level, or even increased, during the pandemic, as child care centers have been required to have fully dedicated staff for each classroom as well as staffing to manage the new pickup and drop-off procedures.
Sanitation Supplies: While child care providers have always had high sanitation standards, they have had to purchase additional personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves, thermometers for temperature monitoring, and additional hand sanitizer and disinfectant.
The increased costs of providing child care during the pandemic are too high for providers to shoulder on their own. Many states have used funding from the CARES Act to help offset their increased costs. However, data from CAP’s calculator shows that the CARES Act only covered 30 percent of the cost of child care slots for one month.
These findings provide more evidence of the need for greater, immediate federal investment in child care to ensure that providers can meet these additional costs, stay open, and provide safe care for the millions of children and families who rely on it.
You can find the methodology for the cost calculator from the Center for American Progress here.
Child Care Providers, Working Moms Face Big Challenges Amid COVID-19
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In a recent MSNBC News special, Ali Vitali spoke with child care providers who are struggling to stay open and serve their communities, and with working mothers who are being forced to make difficult decisions between their careers and ensuring their children have access to safe, healthy child care.
During one interview, Lynita Law-Reid, a child care provider in Washington, DC, shared her story about the difficult decisions she faced in reopening her business and caring for children.
“[If] they don’t go to work, many of them don’t get paid,” she told NBC News, noting that many of these parents are the heads of their households and describing the kinds of phone calls she got while closed. “Things like, ‘Miss Law. When are you guys gonna reopen? Because my baby has gone from my sister’s house for one week because I have to work, to my grandmother’s house. Next week, I’m not quite sure where I’ll put her, you know, but I have to get to work.’”
This pandemic has pushed an already struggling child care industry to the brink of collapse and data show that women are carrying the bulk of the crisis as they make up a vast majority of the child care workforce and are more likely than fathers to leave work to care for their children in the absence of care. At the beginning of the pandemic nearly a third of child care jobs were eliminated between February and April, with women accounting for 95 percent of those losses. As of July, the workforce was still 20 percent smaller than it was pre-pandemic. New data from the Bipartisan Policy Center indicates 70% of the nation’s child care facilities are either closed or operating a reduced capacity.
While there have been bipartisan efforts in recent months to provide additional child care relief through a stabilization fund, negotiations between Congress and the White House on a final economic recovery package have stalled.
“When are you guys gonna reopen? Because my baby has gone from my sister's house for one week because I have to work, to my grandmother's house. Next week, I'm not quite sure where I'll put her, you know, but I have to get to work.”https://t.co/JcSzZjknPOpic.twitter.com/E3RyUjOVuA
New Survey Of Parents Reveals COVID-19’s Disruptive Impact On Child Care
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The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) recently released results of a survey it conducted with Morning Consult on how COVID-19 affected child care arrangements and needs of parents across the country. Citing parents’ urgent need for accessible child care services and the devastating effects the pandemic has brought upon the child care industry, BPC explained how sustaining quality child care programs is critical to our long-term economic recovery.
The survey, which reached 1,000 parents of young children under age five, concluded that 44% of parents found the lack of child care resources a barrier to their remote or in-person work. Additionally, more than half of the parents who have sought child care during the pandemic found it difficult to find quality care that falls within their budget. These parents’ struggle to find affordable care for their young children results from the fact that over 70% of child care programs either closed permanently or are now operating at reduced capacity or hours.
Other notable conclusions from the survey include:
While some parents have the option to work remotely, 22% of parents cannot return to work in person without child care.
Finding care was especially challenging for those with lower incomes, with 72% of parents with an income less than $50,000 expressing some degree of difficulty.
Over three-fourths of parents (77%) are concerned that returning their children to a child care program will increase the risk of exposing their family to COVID-19.
You can read the full survey results and BPC’s analysis here.
NEW ANALYSIS: Lack of Child Care Impacting Millennial Women Most
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A new Center for American Progress analysis of Census Bureau data reveals a growing crisis that will devastate working women as our nation recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the research released this week, Millennial mothers, who make up the majority of the paid labor force in America, are nearly three times more likely than Millennial fathers to report being unable to work due to COVID-19 related school or child care closures. This not only causes personal financial challenges for women and families, but also has widespread consequences for our nation’s long-term economic recovery.
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Millennial parents struggled to balance working from home while caring for and educating their children at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, while millions of others were forced to reduce their hours at work and reduce their expenses. Child care providers were forced to close for an indeterminate amount of time, leaving essential workers — who are disproportionately women of color — to struggle to find safe, available child care for their children.
According to the data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, beginning in April, the number of parents citing child care closures as the main reason for being unable to return to work began increasing to a peak of 38 percent for Millennial mothers in late June and early July, before slightly declining. More than one- third of nonworking Millennial mothers reported “caring for children not in school or [child] care” as their main reason for not working. Millennial fathers on the other hand were nearly three times less likely to choose the lack of child care as their main reason for not working. It is clear that child care responsibilities and the lack of child care availability in America during and after this pandemic are having a negative impact on Millennial mothers’ participation in the labor force, with compounding effects as the pandemic continues.
Research shows that leaving the workforce for even a couple of years impacts a woman’s lifetime earnings, and the growing child care crisis caused by COVID-19 will only exacerbate the gender earnings gap for years to come if we allow the child care industry to collapse. Without a significant investment in child care providers, an estimated 4.5 million licensed child care slots will be permanently lost and working parents will be left with few options as they return to work. Without child care, our economic recovery will be incomplete and working parents — especially mothers — may never fully recover.
Read the full report from the Center for American Progress here.
CONTACT CONGRESS: Time is Running Out to #SaveChildCare
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Leaders from Capitol Hill and the White House are finalizing the details of the COVID-19 recovery bill, and we need your help to ensure there is enough emergency funding to #savechildcare.
Both the House and Senate have proposals to include stabilization funding for the child care industry in the COVID-19 recovery package. There is clear agreement among Republicans and Democrats that the success of America’s economic recovery will be contingent on whether child care providers receive the emergency financial relief they need to stay in business.
None of that matters if Congressional leaders and the White House don’t prioritize child care relief in their final negotiations. Take action!
We’ve reached a make or break moment, and we need your help to make sure your lawmakers are prioritizing child care with House and Senate leadership.
Here’s what we know:
The Senate Republican HEALS Act would provide $15 billion for the child care industry;
And the House passed the Child Care Is Essential Act with bipartisan support, which would provide $50 billion in child care stabilization funding;
But at the end of the day, if Speaker Pelosi, Leader McConnell, and the White House don’t include stabilization funding levels that will keep America’s child care providers in business in the final bill, experts predict half of America’s child care supply will disappear. What’s more, Head Start and MIECHV also need crucial funding from Congress to respond to COVID-19.
Contact your representatives in the House and Senate and ask them to do everything possible in these final hours of negotiation to ensure this relief package includes significant funding to actually save child care before it’s too late.
