"Those Greedy $@!&% Are Why You Can't Have What You Deserve"

And other tips from Katherine Goldstein's Playbook to Transform How America Cares

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It’s election season, and there are calls to action — Donate! Sign a Petition! Register Voters! filling my inbox daily.

In light of that, I’m re-upping this interview I did with Katherine Goldstein, a journalist and care advocate who I admire a ton.

Last year, she released A Playbook to Transform How America Cares, and it is packed with plans — not concepts of plans! Actual plans! — for how to improve people’s lives right now.

The Playbook is a set of eight tactics that policymakers, activists, and the rest of us can use for getting better, more inclusive services for parents, children, home care workers, teachers and anyone else who is or will be in need of caregiving, which is….literally everyone.

This is an edited version of our conversation. (The full interview, posted last December, is here.) Hope you enjoy!

Katherine Goldstein, author of The Double Shift

I only really started thinking about the need for better caregiving policies when I became a parent at 42. And then when my dad died two years later, andI had both experiences of caregiving for a baby and caregiving for an elder. I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't have a bigger social understanding around this, prior to having a personal connection. 

Every time a woman says motherhood radicalizes her, an angel gets its wings.

Very few things radicalize anyone more than personal experience. So I think that it's good that people are allowing their personal experiences to connect to the systemic. 

I'm curious how you think about caregiving as a way to organize politically.

When I say I'm working on a playbook about care, a lot of times people think I'm talking about health care. And so immediately I'm, like, “No, it's everything else. It's all the ways we care for people.” 

And I actually think we should not just talk about policy names. If you say “universal pre-K” that’s a policy, and people may or may not know the details, the ins-and-outs of that.

 But if you say “how we care for children,” basically everyone can understand. 

I recently did a poll and asked, “How many of you identify as a caregiver?” And some people are like, “Well, some days more than others.” I'm like, “If you identify any day as a caregiver, I think you are a caregiver.”

That can really help people understand that it can be very inclusive. We think of it as early child care or early child rearing.  But what about doing insurance paperwork for your elderly parents from across the country? Making sure your sibling’s medications are lined up for the week?  That is caregiving. 

The reality is that all 73 million Baby Boomers are going to be 65 by 2030. 

And our elder care system is basically held together with Scotch tape and twine.

It's nowhere ready for this.

In order for our society to function and for us to be able to support this demographic shift, we have to get people in those jobs. In-home health service jobs are going to be one of the fastest-growing job segments in the next 10 years. So if you don't think this is a skill, or this is not a valuable job, the market forces are just going to come and snap right back at you on that.

What were some of the tactics for successful care initiatives and the success of certain kinds of groups? You flagged MomsRising and Campaign for Family Friendly Economy for example. 

So ballot initiatives, I believe, are really not a well-known enough lever to get government money for care programs, without the federal government intervening and without getting state legislatures on board. 

When you put care policies, especially around paid leave and child care initiatives, in front of voters, and your objective is clear, and your campaign is well-run, these are wildly popular with voters across the political spectrum. 

It's not like explaining industrial policy or tax policy and how that's going to impact someone. People get that they can't find childcare, or they can't keep a home health aide for their elderly parents. That is very clear to them. So ballot initiatives are super cool. 

I highly recommend people check out the Children's Funding Project, which offers tons and tons of resources about ballot initiatives, specifically around funding for children's services.

There is a mechanism in a number of states called voter approved children's funds, which is basically creating dedicated pools of money for children's services, and they currently raise $1.5 billion every year. They're all over the country. The downside is not all states allow ballot initiatives and not all states have voter approved children's funds. I live in North Carolina where we don't have ballot initiatives. Very sad. 

I wanted to ask you about the tactic of “naming and shaming corporate greed.” You describe it as a powerful way to counter the opposition. 

I think one of the reasons that Build Back Better did not pass was that there was not an effective, ready, sharp, knives-out strategy against the opposition.

The opposition was some of the most powerful business lobby organizations in the country, who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying a year, who do not want their taxes raised, and they will put anyone down who wants to raise their taxes for any reason. They do not give a fuck.

So the idea, that we're all coming together, and saying, “Isn't this great for everyone? This is really going to help children!” — that is not counting the opposition.

Countering the opposition is: These greedy fucks are why you cannot have what you deserve. 

There wasn't the political muscle and a machine in place to do that. Corporate greed is a wildly popular villain. And these policies are wildly popular.  So we have all the great building blocks for an effective political movement.

There just has to be coalescing, and there has to be a lot more money behind this movement. We're going to take them down the way and get the policies we deserve the same way people did with Big Tobacco. The climate movement has spent decades working on this. The care movement has spent like, three years working on this.

But I think it's absolutely possible to do. 

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Want to read more about care? Check out these conversations:

Angela Garbes on Power and Pleasure in Caregiving

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In Praise of Promiscuous Care