Child care also frees parents, and in particular mothers, to work outside the home. Universal preschool in the District of Columbia, introduced in 2009, increased the labor force participation rate for mothers with young children by 10 percentage points. Universal child care in Quebec, begun in 1996, helped the province achieve the highest rate of prime-aged working women in the world. The resulting increase in tax revenue has more than covered the cost of Quebec’s program.
But by and large the United States is paying the price for a failure to invest significant federal money in child care and early education, and we will continue down that road if child care funding is cut back or stripped from the Democrats’ package. Labor force participation for American mothers is 19 percent lower than for similar childless women. As recently as 1990 we led the world in how many women were in our work force, but we’ve since slipped to the bottom of the rankings, and a lack of investment in child care is one of the main culprits.
Another culprit is a lack of guaranteed paid family leave. Mr. Biden originally planned to ensure all workers 12 weeks of pay for a new child, serious illness, military deployment, death in the family or in the case of domestic violence and sexual assault, which would have allowed 18 million people — more than a tenth of the entire civilian labor force — to take paid leave each year.
Ditching this provision from the package, which Mr. Biden did to appease Mr. Manchin, means those millions of people will be faced with either losing income to care for themselves or their families or neglecting that care and continuing to work. Guaranteeing only four weeks, as House leadership has proposed, won’t get postpartum parents or seriously sick spouses terribly far.
The United States now guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid family leave (and that’s just for the 56 percent who qualify). Without guaranteed pay, 7 percent of all employees in 2018 needed to take leave but didn’t, and the majority said it was because they couldn’t afford to. Many of those who did manage to take unpaid leave experienced financial difficulty: More than three-quarters of people who got partial pay or nothing at all cut back on their spending and about 30 percent borrowed money or put off paying bills. Nearly one in five had to go on public assistance.
Paid leave, on the other hand, would not only give people the money they need to survive and stay out of debt; it would also keep them attached to their jobs by allowing them the chance to step away without a financial penalty when life demands it. That’s true not just for new parents who need time to bond with and care for new babies, but also for those whose loved ones suffer a health emergency or a new disability. An estimated six million extra people would stay connected to the labor force if we had paid leave. Without it, we’ll keep hemorrhaging workers.
Some of the people we’re losing are forced to step away to care for disabled or elderly family members. More than 800,000 people are on waiting lists to receive professional home-based care through Medicaid (and that’s just for those who have spent down their assets, or never had enough to begin with, to qualify for the program). Democrats had at first proposed spending $400 billion on home-based care for the disabled and elderly, which would have been enough to clear Medicaid’s wait list.
