Child Care Workers Should Not Carry Burden of Failed Economic Policies
This post is addressed to child care workers, which includes everyone whose work contributes to the care of children (parents, grandparents daycare workers, preschool teachers, other ECEers, etc.)…
I don’t know about any of you, but I have not helped decide how to structure the economy from the halls of power, or written a government budget, or decided on monetary policy for the Bank of Canada. I was not in the room when the minimum wage was set at a poverty-wage level, or when it was decided to abandon a national child care policy, or when transportation and urban planners decided to make 2 hours a day of commuting routine for many workers.
I don’t think that it should be on our shoulders to carry the burden of responsibility that should instead be on those who are in these rooms of power. The people making decisions that are leaving too many children and families without adequate child care supports should be held to account and made to do a better job in carrying out their role as leaders of our democracy.
This is to say that those of us on the outside of power should not be expected to carry an unfair load because those in power failed to provide for adequate family supports. The failings of the policy makers need to be solved by everyone working to figure out a better way to support families, not by child care workers taking on an unfair burden in the form of low-wages and extended working hours. The current “go it alone” child care strategy simply doesn’t work – we should expect better from our leaders.
Economic policies, like monetary supply, trade relation treaties, labour law, tax policy, government spending policy, and economic development policy all lead to real differences in how ordinary people live our lives. These policies determine how many hours a week we work, how much time we spend in traffic or on transit, whether or not it will cost $900,000 to buy a house in Vancouver, who gets access to essential services (like health care, housing, education, child care), and how much of our productively at work goes to support our social needs.
When the decision makers decide to set up an economy based on 40-50 work weeks, two wage-earner families, and 2 hour commutes, the burden for solving the crisis these decisions create in children’s lives needs to fall on the decision makers themselves, not on child care workers or families. The decision makers have the power to fix the problem. We should demand that they use that power to solve the problem their bad economic strategies created.
There is no way to build a child care system on the backs of child care workers, as such an approach simply won’t work. No matter how much we (child care workers) care about the well-being of children, asking us to put in extra hours or continue to be unpaid or underpaid for our work is not acceptable and won’t result in the kinds of supports that all families require. Solutions to the child care crisis require public sector support, in the form of a comprehensive system that – just like with public health care – is provided universally, efficiently and fairly.
