“Iowa … has one of the nation’s highest percentages of families with working parents who need child care,” Huffington Post says. But like other states, Iowa is struggling with a shortage of providers, which is contributing to a labor shortage by keeping parents at home.
The providers, for their part, are struggling with their own staffing shortages. Child care is a notoriously low-paying occupation, and in an economy short of workers, they’re losing employees to better-paying jobs. But they can’t raise wages, because many parents can’t afford higher prices for child care.
The only real source of money to solve this problem is government subsidies. Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill would have provided them, but Republicans blocked it in Congress.
Back in Iowa, Kelly Donnelly, director of an acclaimed preschool, at first “was thrilled to hear her state’s Republican lawmakers were going to act on child care,” Huffington Post says, but then “grew alarmed when she learned what exactly they had in mind.”
What Donnelly hoped for was “significant new state expenditures on child care to subsidize families that can’t afford it and, especially, to subsidize wages of caregivers, so that centers like hers could compete with the local retailers and service industries offering higher pay.”
Instead, what Iowa GOP legislators proposed to do is “reduce adult-to-child ratios, so that one care worker could watch over as many as eight 2-year-olds, instead of the six that the state now allows.” Donnelly says that will put more workload and strain on child care workers, with no increase in pay, making child care jobs even less attractive than they are now. And increase the incidence of child injuries. “If you’re giving them less attention, accidents are going to happen,” she says.
Those Republicans also propose to “allow 16- and 17-year-old employees to watch over school-aged kids without adult supervision.” Child advocates think that’s unwise. Teenagers, they argue, aren’t ready for that responsibility and this, too, would increase the risks of harm to the children.
“Another [GOP] bill would let providers charge co-pays to families on government assistance, even though those families are by definition struggling to cover basic life expenses.” That solves nothing; it would put child care out of reach for those families.
This is just one issue of many, but it helps illustrates why voting for Republicans is an inferior way to solve many of society’s problems. It takes child care to get parents of young children back into the labor-starved workforce, and providing child care takes money that neither providers nor parents have, but Republicans aren’t willing to spend public resources on solving that problem. (They will, however, spend trillions on wars; and the $100 million of taxpayer money they spent on investigating Hillary Clinton would have paid for a lot of child care.)
What you see them doing, instead, is falling back on Republican deregulation dogma. How has that worked? In the 1980s, Republican deregulation of the savings and loan industry gave us the S&L scandals and collapse. In the 1990s, Republican utility deregulation gave us the Enron and WorldCom scandals. In the 2000s, Republican mortgage lending deregulation gave us the subprime mortgage scandals, housing collapse, and Great Recession. Their deregulation track record stinks.
You don’t get something for nothing in this world. If employers want to hire working parents, they have to be able to get child care, which costs money. Government subsidizes business in other ways, and it should subsidize this. Otherwise, these parents can’t work, and can’t fill jobs that are going begging.
Measures that will drive even more workers away from child care jobs by increasing the workload and stress without increasing pay, and compromising child safety in the process, won’t solve the problem. It will only worsen the shortage of child care workers, and make parents less willing to put their children in child care.
Our country needs two good political parties with competing ideas in order for the best solutions to society’s challenges to win out. But we don’t have that, in no small part because Republicans can’t seem to do anything right. They simply aren’t any good at coming up with practical solutions to real-life problems, often because their rigid ideology gets in the way.