Back in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan highlighted a feature of American public policy that goes almost entirely unremarked-upon today, writing that:
American social policy until now has been directed toward the individual. The individual—and the various circumstances relating to him—has been our primary unit of measurement: men, women, and children are all lumped together. Thus, our employment statistics count as equally unemployed a father of nine children, a housewife coming back into the labor market in her forties, and a teen-ager looking for a part-time job after school. The minimum wage required by law to be paid to any of these persons is exactly the same. If they should somehow have the same level of earnings—which would be easy enough—and were to lose their jobs, the amount of unemployment insurance paid to each would be exactly the same. The examples are numerous; the point does not change. American arrangements pertain to the individual, and only in the rarest circumstances do they define the family as the relevant unit.
While Moynihan was only using the example of employment statistics to prove a point, it’s a valuable observation in its own right. After all, as the old axiom goes, “what gets measured gets managed.” While it may be difficult to imagine updating the GDP calculation to include the overlooked value of domestic work anytime soon, or even debating the creation of minimum-wage tiers by family status, employment statistics offer a simple monthly snapshot of the well-being of American families. With the most recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) coming out today, now is as good a time as any to consider what family-conscious employment data might look like.
Some peer nations already do this. Here, for instance, is one cut of the monthly labor force snapshot produced by Statistics Canada (a government entity which serves, in this respect, the same function as the American BLS):
Making this change would likely not be a heavy lift for BLS. As it stands, BLS already produces an annual report on the “employment characteristics of families,” and microdata released in the middle of each month allows third-party researchers to derive labor force participation by age of youngest child, so the necessary data is already being collected.
However, the monthly BLS releases—which have enough oomph that they’ve taken on the colloquial name of “Jobs Day“—occupy a notably different place in the discourse. Every Jobs Day reliably fuels a raft of media articles and segments, and by offering month-over-month data, it allows for a far more timely look at trends. What’s more, BLS already publishes disaggregated data as part of the Jobs Day reports, including data sheets that were added 16 years ago to show employment by veteran, nativity, and disability status.
This also presents the current Administration with an opportunity to embrace family-friendly measures (and perhaps even find some bipartisan convergence). They have already shown such an inclination in certain areas, as with the Department of Transportation launching a substantial initiative to make airports more family-friendly. The Department of Labor and BLS can thus also be part of a comprehensive approach to taking families’ differentiated needs seriously; the timing would be fortuitous, with a new BLS commissioner nominee currently before the Senate for confirmation.
At a time when American families feel increasingly ignored and disconnected from their government, adding a Jobs Day series that disaggregates employment by the youngest child’s age would be a simple but meaningful step forward. It is part and parcel of a real national family policy, one that moves past siloed programmatic interventions and toward enduring principles that government has a role in supporting the stability, predictability, and quality of family life. It could even be a strike toward moving social policy beyond pure individualism and restoring the family to its rightful place at the center of policymaking conversations.
Elliot Haspel is a Senior Fellow at Capita.
