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My daughter’s teacher quit a few weeks ago. Just before the holiday break, we got an email saying she was leaving, along with information about a new teacher, who would have a few days in the classroom before the break began.
Of course, I was upset. My kid loved this teacher, and came home with the stories she told and the songs she sang. She was in Zoom kindergarten last year and we were excited that she was in-person, masked and vaxxed, in daily contact with a bunch of people other than her two geriatric parents.
But to be honest, part of me was like, “Good on you, teach. That is one tough gig.”
A lot of people are working their tails off right now. Among the many people who are working hard right now are West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and members of the Republican party, who are doing all they can to set fire to the Build Back Better Act and dump it in the trash.
The Washington Post reported over the weekend that Manchin appears to be walking away from his own counter-offer on the initial bill.
Build Back Better would have, among other things, extended the Child Tax Credit, expanded childcare spending and universal pre-K. It had a host of provisions to battle the climate emergency through tax credits that would encourage clean energy use. But Manchin told Fox News that he couldn’t “continue with this piece of legislation.”
But even if “kids, care and climate” is snuffed out (and it may still get re-written, albeit in pieces), care work itself has really come into the light. The idea that care work is part of our critical national infrastructure has gained real traction since the pandemic struck.
Even the term “care work” has become an expression that more people are using to describe the paid and unpaid labor involved with taking care of old people, young people and people who are sick.
I read a report recently by the FrameWorks Institute, which conducted a series of focus-group type interviews to try to get at how people’s attitudes about care work have shifted since the pandemic started. FrameWorks is a non-profit that researches attitudes about different social issues to try to influence action around progressive causes.
The responses in their care work research, called “Public Thinking About Care Work in a Time of Social Upheaval” were a mix.
On one hand, people now see the work of home health aides and nursing home workers, for example, as critical. The emotional and psychological support they provide is essential work, especially when many older and ill folks can’t see their families directly because of Covid-19 related restrictions. These workers were celebrated as soldiers in a “war” against Covid-19, the research found.
This is good news: for attitudes to change and for people to get active around a cause, the issue “has to be top of mind,” FrameWork’s CEO Nat Kendall-Taylor told me. “It has to be somewhere on the public's radar in terms of social issues.”
From that perspective, he said, care work has really moved “from being completely and utterly, totally invisible to being somewhat recognizable as an issue,” he said.
This bodes well for legislation like Build Back Better, because it’ll be harder (though not impossible!) to ignore care-related issues.
On the other hand, the research found, people still assume that those people who do this work possess certain inherent character traits; some people are just “naturally” inclined to do caregiving jobs.
Caregiving skills can’t be learned, the reasoning goes. Some people are just born being good at caring for others.
One of the impacts of this attitude is that we are less inclined to think that those workers need more support or resources, the research found..
“For care work outside hospital settings, where care is already viewed as less skilled and less important, this understanding creates an even higher barrier to building support for programs and policies that address inequities and injustices,” the authors of the study wrote.
And let’s just be clear that it’s women, and women of color in particular, who perform these roles. So the attribution of “natural” traits is tied to our system’s fundamental racism and misogyny.
“If the picture in your head of care workers are people who we tend to undervalue, then it becomes difficult to make decisions about the use of our public resources to support those people,” Kendall-Taylor said.
“So if you think care work is provided by women of color, and you undervalue the worth of those individuals, then it makes sense that you wouldn't make care work a priority for investment,” he said.
This just seems so important to underscore from the research findings:
“The assumption that care work depends on natural capacity to care makes it harder for people to see how systems, supports, and policies can improve care.”
It strikes me as another way we think of care workers, and particular care workers who are women of color, as basically disposable: Since they are “naturally” good at their work, there must be someone just like them, equally good at it, who can replace them when they burnout, get sick, or quit.
Which brings me back to my kid’s teacher.
To be clear, the FrameWorks research didn’t directly address the work of school teachers.
But school teachers, and caregivers more generally, fall into a broad category of workers who I think many of us view as just naturally inclined toward doing their jobs.
And when we start seeing some kinds of work as based on just individual aptitude, we stop seeing the need to support it structurally.
Someone smarter than me has probably applied this notion to why we don’t blink at generous corporate welfare support, while social services agencies are left to scrape together the meager dollars they receive from philanthropists and shrinking state budgets.
Or why there is almost never any real debate over massive military spending, while education and social service spending gets nickel-and-dimed into the grave.
I know I’m out on a limb here, but maybe the issue of care isn’t salient to Joe Manchin, because his life has been maintained and supported by a string of people who he sees as replaceable, disposable workers.
Other research from FrameWorks suggests that taking a big picture, systemic viewpoint around a range of issues — from racial justice to the economy — is becoming more dominant; “more ‘thinkable’ on certain issues for certain people,” said Nat Kendall-Taylor, the FrameWorks CEO.
But, he added, “The degree to which that pertains for care work, I think, remains to be seen.”
THIS:
"I know I’m out on a limb here, but maybe the issue of care isn’t salient to Joe Manchin, because his life has been maintained and supported by a string of people who he sees as replaceable, disposable workers." So many of us are guilty of this and it needs to end, and the higher up the ladder you are, the more callous you seem to be. Love how this connects problematic attitudes re: race and gender esp, and links them to big systemic issues.