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As a young mother in Detroit, Nicole and her husband both work full-time to make ends meet. All summer, they had to patch together childcare by relying on expensive day camps and trading favors with her sister, and the new school year was a welcome return to routine.
Michigan’s free school breakfast and lunch program helps offset the high cost of groceries for the family, which is a relief because Nicole is a part of the growing sandwich generation. Her dad is aging and requires part-time home care, which is only partially covered by his insurance. She and her sister both chip in as much as they can to cover the cost and take turns checking in on him after work, helping him manage his bills, and driving him to appointments.
Nicole also tag teams with her husband to make sure their kids get where they need to be every day — school, sports, scout meetings, the doctor. It never feels like they have enough time, money, or sleep. And they are exhausted.
Too often, caregivers internalize their struggles and see their exhaustion as personal failings. But it’s not; it’s a societal failing — and it calls for systemic solutions.
The care crisis is just starting to get the attention it deserves and has increasingly become a topic during political debates and forums. Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign released an economic plan in August that included child tax credits for families and support for child care.
U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) suggested that if we want to solve the child care crisis, grandparents just need to step up to watch their grandkids. A day later, Trump gave a rambling response on how he would lower the cost of child care — in which he bizarrely veered off into talking about tariffs against other countries.
As laughable and disconnected from reality as these gaffes are, they highlight the fact that many leaders are still woefully unprepared to talk about child and elder care as the crises they are.
The care crisis was dramatically exacerbated by the pandemic, when families were suddenly left without childcare and schools went remote. Parents still had to work — some exclusively at home, juggling both their jobs and their kids’ Zoom classrooms; others continued to work outside the home, forced to face heightened COVID risks and leave their children to sort out remote schooling on their own.
When faced with the reality that, in 2024, women are still paid only 78 cents on the dollar compared to male peers — and this pay gap is even more acute for Black women, moms, Latinas, other women of color, and LGBTQ+ people — it’s not surprising that this crisis created what economists called the “she-cession.” When families reached their breaking point, it made sense for the higher earner to stay in the workforce, so women left the workforce in droves to help keep their families afloat.
The pandemic didn’t create these crises, but it did make them worse.
With more generations now living at the same time than any period in U.S. history, America’s workers are being forced to make impossible choices in an attempt to care for their families, care for their parents, and plan for their futures. While Nicole is just one woman, she exemplifies what so many Americans are struggling with — and it’s past time we do something about it.
A challenge this complex will require a commitment to enacting a variety of policy solutions, many of which have already been proposed or piloted in Michigan.
A great place to start would be raising wages to ensure employers pay working people not just a minimum wage, but a living wage, and offering stronger support for people struggling to climb out of poverty. The new Rx Kids program is a great example of a program that provides a guaranteed basic income for new moms in Flint as the community continues to grapple with the long-lasting effects of the water crisis. Education is another tool that helps people attain the skills they need to secure living wage jobs. During the pandemic, Michigan launched the Futures for Frontliners scholarship program so essential workers could earn college degrees, eventually helping them achieve higher-paying jobs with the skills that employers desperately need.
Another measure that would have an enormous impact on the care crisis is paid sick leave and family and medical leave for all, so Michiganders don’t have to make impossible decisions like choosing between making rent or caring for their sick child or a dying parent in their final days. After years of litigation, a Michigan judge recently ruled that Michigan’s 2018 voter petitions for minimum wage and sick leave — which Republican lawmakers backed by powerful interests tried to severely water down — must go into effect as voters originally intended.
Child care businesses are another critical piece of this puzzle. By investing in our care economy and subsidizing the cost of child care, we could build on the successes of Michigan’s child care relief grants that helped child care providers stay open during the pandemic and pay their workers so parents could return to work. The Michigan League for Public Policy recently released a report showing that these measures are working — and called for bigger investments in childcare. The same could be done for elder care, to help ease the burdens of our aging population. Gov. Whitmer repealed an unpopular pension tax and signed the Working Families Tax Credit into law in 2023, enacting a statewide policy that mirrors the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) — a proven tool for fighting poverty. But we can go further.
Michigan has always been a leader in workplace innovation, and Michigan’s workers built the middle class. Following the Industrial Revolution — when workers endured 14-to-16-hour days, in dangerous conditions, six days a week — working Michiganders unionized.
In 1926, Ford cut its employees’ 48-hour work week to 40 in response to worker demands. In 1940, the U.S. followed Michigan’s lead and made the 40-hour work week and overtime pay standard nationwide. During World War II, employers in Michigan and other states began offering health care insurance to attract and retain employees, and today, these benefits are the standard for most full-time jobs.
Michigan’s history is proof that through policy and innovation, we can change the way we structure our systems of work and care to better fit our lives. Our current structure — with its stagnant wages, no guaranteed paid time off, and lackluster caregiving supports — was built when it was assumed every home had one man working outside the home and one (unpaid) woman working inside it. But this model doesn’t serve our modern society, in which most of the nation’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires; family structures are increasingly single-parent or blended families; and people are living longer than ever before.
The truth is, we can build on these pandemic-era programs and enact new, innovative, and permanent solutions to help Michiganders thrive. We shouldn’t wait to respond only in moments of crisis when the problems finally become too large to ignore.
And unlike the pandemic, this current crisis isn’t temporary, and if we continue to ignore it, it will become an intergenerational problem. This moment calls for a reimagination of what our work and care systems look like, requiring families, policymakers, and forward-thinking businesses to work together to push the limits of what’s possible.
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