Exclusive: Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith have a plan to fix the pandemic child care crisis
The coronavirus pandemic could destroy America’s child care system. The senators have a $50 billion plan for that.
By Anna North Apr 15, 2020, 8:00am EDT
Child care workers in America are in an untenable position right now. Some are on the front lines of the coronavirus response, caring for children of essential workers while often lacking health insurance themselves. Others are unable to make ends meet as families keep their kids at home and day care centers shutter.
Meanwhile, parents are left wondering whether their children’s care providers will even be in business when the pandemic is over, making child care possibly harder to find and more expensive than before.
Now, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tina Smith (D-MN) are releasing a proposal to fix the problem. The plan, posted on Medium on Wednesday and provided to Vox exclusively ahead of publication, would set aside $50 billion for America’s child care system in the next coronavirus relief package. The money would be used in three main ways: to provide hazard pay and other support to those still caring for the children of essential workers, to help other providers keep paying their staff while they are closed, and to shore up the child care system (including boosting wages) for the future.
“When the time comes,” Warren and Smith write, “we will not be able to rebuild our economy if this country’s child care system has collapsed beneath the economic burden of this pandemic.”
The proposal is far more ambitious than the $3.5 billion set aside for child care in the recent federal stimulus legislation. And thus its prospects in the Republican-controlled Senate are uncertain, to say the least. But it is in line with what child care experts say is necessary to make sure child care providers can keep paying their workers during this time and reopen when it is safe to do so — and to remedy some of the inequities that have left child care workers in this country underpaid, overworked, and unacknowledged.
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/15/21220111/coronavirus-child-care-warren-plan
= new reply since forum marked as read
