This article was originally published by Joe Waters on LinkedIn.
New economic and employment realities, combined with an aging population, threaten caregiving structures and values. We must affirm the worth and dignity of caregiving and the people who provide it.
Affordable and accessible care, at both the beginning and the end of life, is a major challenge, despite its central role in allowing people to participate in the economy and fulfill their basic drive to form families. This picture has been further complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
As a result of technology, globalization and shifting social values, the economy is transitioning away from predictable schedules and long-term relationships between employers and employees, making parents’ needs for child care even more diverse. The pandemic has highlighted these challenges, as parents struggle to work from home while also helping with schoolwork or providing child care. In addition, the population is aging rapidly, with the number of families who support both older and younger relatives expected to increase. Meanwhile, the existing challenges of caring for older adults and the disabled in assisted living facilities and nursing homes have been exacerbated by high infection rates and the physical and social isolation required to protect vulnerable adults from Covid-19.
In a 2018 survey, the top reason parents gave for having fewer children than they wanted was that “child care is too expensive.” In the United States, 12 percent of parents who have a child at home are also providing unpaid care for an adult and 70 million Americans are expected to become multigenerational caregivers by 2030.
Care is essential, but our struggle to provide it and our treatment of paid caregivers are holding us all back.
As UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently said, “the response to the pandemic, and to the widespread discontent that preceded it, must be based on a New Social Contract.” This social contract must not only value care itself; it must also provide adequate protections and respect for caregivers, both paid and unpaid.
In order to seriously value the contributions of all caregivers and the dignity of caregiving, we must begin by valuing care work as work. Caregiving enables significant economic productivity, permitting many of us to hold jobs outside the home, powering businesses large and small. Yet the compensation for this labor does not reflect its value. Care work is performed mostly by women, often women of color. Caregivers often do not have health insurance, participate in Social Security, or receive pensions or other benefits. Many rely on public assistance to eat and make ends meet.
This is an affront to their dignity and the dignity of people in their care: our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, people who are disabled or suffering from chronic conditions. Valuing care work as work is necessary for ensuring equality and dignity for our caregivers, who make all other work possible.
We struggle to value care and caregivers because we live in what Pope Francis has trenchantly called “a throwaway culture.” This culture, formed by consumerism, teaches us to view other people, particularly those with whom we have primarily an economic relationship, as disposable and replaceable. It teaches us to view their work as valuable only for its economic benefits.
How we treat our environment is a great example of this mentality: we toss single-use plastics into the world’s oceans, rivers, streams, and landfills, we consume fossil fuels to drive our consumer appetites, and we corral animals in cruel conditions so that we can have meat on our plates three times a day. Similarly, we are “guided by arrogance of domination, possession, manipulation, exploitation” in our treatment of care workers. We desperately need caregivers yet too many are used, then discarded without the compensation their work deserves.
The throwaway culture is not limited to how we treat, pay, and support those who care for children or older adults, but extends to how corporations treat employees who must care for others. Isn’t Florida State University’s recent (but now retracted) announcement that employees would no longer be able to care for children while working remotely a mark of this throwaway culture?
The New Social Contract must demand recognition, both within broader society and by governments and businesses, that care jobs can be good jobs worth having–jobs that demand skills and talent to be developed by training and affirmed by credentials.
At governmental, corporate, and individual levels, the New Social Contract should ensure robust protections and social benefits for paid caregivers and time and space to support the work of unpaid, family caregivers. The Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights promoted by the National Domestic Workers Alliance and already adopted in several states is an example of a framework for providing protections for domestic workers commensurate with their dignity. It would guarantee the right to overtime pay, days of rest, protections from harassment, and breaks for meals and rest.
As Secretary-General Guterres said, “Covid-19 has been likened to an x-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built.” The deepest and most difficult of these fractures to set are the inequalities between those who are able to pay for care, those who depend on that care, and those who provide it. If we seize the moment that this pandemic presents and adopt a New Social Contract, it can be the framework that moves us away from our throwaway culture and towards the goals of reciprocity, justice, and dignity for those who give care and those who receive it– all of us at some point in our lives.