President Biden’s American Jobs Plan & What it Means for Moms & Childcare
Joy Burkhard, MBA
By Joy Burkhard, MBA
This week, the White House released President Biden’s ‘American Jobs Plan’ – a roughly $2 trillion package intended to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and revitalize the economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
If approved by Congress:
The American Jobs Plan is expected to create millions of jobs and provide $25 billion to struggling child care centers and build new centers.
Facts about Child Care in the U.S.:
Pre-covid, nearly 90% of parents in dual-income households took advantage of some kind of child-care arrangement, according to an analysis by the Department of Education
Many who were able, leaned on a family member or if they could afford one, a nanny, but almost 60 percent turned to a center-based care arrangement
According to the New York Times, pre-pandemic childcare for one infant would eat up almost a third of median family income, and
Childcare jobs are among the lowest-earning and are held by predominantly female workers (the median hourly wage for child-care workers is just over $11)
Unlike every other developed country, the U.S. hasn’t treated child care as an essential service (with the exception of a few years during World War II).
In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon vetoed a bipartisan effort to implement a universal child-care system because it had what he called “family-weakening implications,” (i.e. moms shouldn’t work) and the industry has been cast as a personal choice — more specifically, a mother’s choice.
The pandemic has provided a window of opportunity to re-examine and develop new solutions that meet parents’ actual needs and desires with childcare.
For parents to get back to work post-pandemic, child-care centers AND new innovative solutions like in-home “Nommies” proposed in the Mom Congress Working Moms Childcare Solutions Act of 2021, need to be readily available.
We believe it’s TIME FOR CHANGE. And Mom Congress is poised to do something by sharing our plan with the White House and key members of the Moms in the House Caucus.
We will continue to monitor the progress of the American Jobs Plan and also President Biden’s expected second half of the “Build Back Better” plan. It is expected to be released in mid-April and include an ambitious proposal to create a universal pre-kindergarten program. “For too long, caregivers — who are disproportionately women, women of color, and immigrants — have been unseen, underpaid and undervalued,” Mr. Biden said.
P.S. Here are two more highlights from the American Jobs Plan that may interest our members:
$213 billion would go toward creating and updating affordable housing and $100 billion would go toward schools.
$400 billion would go to expanding long-term care services and the home health care workforce – an industry that's largely made up of women of color.