Paid Leave, Child Care, and an Economy that Failed Women

WM, Worker and Family Support: Universal Paid Leave and Guaranteed Access to Child Care, May 27, 2021

Among these comments are a set of solutions to the problems of paid leave and childcare.The proposals offered in these comments repeat prior submissions from last year, specifically:

• Ways and Means Subcommittee on Worker and Family Support, Combating Child Poverty in America, March 11, 2020
• Finance, Round Table on Paid Leave Proposals in the COVID Era,, June 18, 2020
• Ways and Means Subcommittee on Worker and Family Support, The Child Care Crisis and the Coronavirus Pandemic, June 23, 2020
• Ways and Means: In Their Own Words: Paid Leave, Child Care, and an Economy that Failed Women, Apr 21, 2021

In January, I commented that sick leave is especially essential to prevent the spread of disease. Unless one argues that it is ultimately good for the population to catch minor illness to build immunity, once a worker or their child falls ill, having to work while ill can be torture. With COVID19, the lack of sick leave can be a death sentence. I was an early SARS-CoV-2 adopter. I do some of my writing at the Alexandria Public Library. On the bright side, because I had been sick in 2019 and had been a stay at home Dad within the last decade, I did not die.

Not requiring sick leave has been justified by the reactionary sector that claims that in the end, the market will sort everything out. Keynes would respond that in the long run, we are all dead. Let me add that one should not have to wait to die for a day off. Marx would agree. For the market to work, there must be both perfect information and no barriers to entry or exit, no black lists, no private salary information. No such luck.

The perception that doing the right thing makes a business non-competitive is the reason we enact minimum wage laws and should require mandatory leave. Because the labor product is almost always well above wages paid, few jobs are lost when this occurs. Higher wages simply reduce what is called the labor surplus, and not only by Marx. Any CFO who cannot calculate the current productive surplus will soon be seeking a job with adequate wages and sick leave.

The requirement that this be provided ends the calculation of whether doing so makes a firm non-competitive because all competitors must provide the same benefit. This applies to businesses of all sizes. If a firm is so precarious that it cannot survive this change, it is probably not viable without it.

Childcare is best provided by the employer or the employee-owned or cooperative firm.On-site care, with separate spaces for well and sick children, as well as an on-site medical site for sick employees, will uncomplicate the morning and evening routine. Making yet another stop in an already busy schedule adds to the stress of the day. Knowing that, if problems arise, parents can be right there, will help workers focus on work.

Larger firms and government agencies can more easily provide such facilities. Indeed, in the Reeves Center of the District Government, such a site already exists. When the crisis is over, a staff visit would prove illuminating.

Smaller firms could make arrangements with the landlord of the building where offices or stores are located, including retail districts and shopping malls. For security reasons, these would only serve local workers, but not retail customers.

A tax on employers would help society share the pain for requiring paid leave. Firms that offer leave would receive a credit on their taxes (especially low wage firms. Tax rates should be set high enough so that

We have included as our usual attachment the latest version of our tax reform proposals. Please refer to the provisions for a Subtraction VAT regarding the remainder of these comments, as well as our treatment of individual payroll taxes, which explain why a child tax credit is better than an EITC. Applying for an EITC is part of why it is expensive to be poor. For most, outside help is needed to calculate it. Paying it is a cost of poverty.

Our main proposed employer-paid subtraction value added tax. This levy would be used more to channel tax expenditures to employees rather than through categorical or block grants. The most important feature is an expanded refundable child tax credit, which would be distributed with pay and set to provide income at median income levels.

The S-VAT could be levied at both the state and federal levels with a common base and tax benefits differing between the states based on their cost of living (which would be paid with the state levy). The federal tax would be the floor of support so that no state could keep any part of its population poor, including migrants. It is time to end the race to the bottom and its associated war on the poor.

Tax reform would help both low wage workers and remove the incentive to move workers who are essentially full time to the gig economy, staffing services, franchise employers and 1099 employment. Because these “vendors” would have to pay the tax and receive the breaks, client firms would have the incentive to hire them instead.

It is time to end the two-tier economy. No one should have to work in what Michael Harrington called The Other America. With the end of welfare as we knew it, circumstances have actually gotten worse since Harrington’s seminal work. The rise of delivery services, which require drivers to earn tips, and the gig economy, which prevents easy tipping, has made things even worse in the name of progress. We are working harder for less. This Committee can start the ball rolling to fix this.

WM: In Their Own Words: Paid Leave, Child Care, and an Economy that Failed Women, Apr 21, 2021

I compliment your selection of a title, which appropriately mocks the anti-socialist fear mongering by Donagh Bracken and Terry D. Turchieo in their volume by the same name. Your witness list serves as a stinging rebuke to these effete reactionaries. 

As a former stay at home parent, I feel a bit left out. The problems of paid leave and child care entered into my calculus in returning to work as soon as I did (which I regret having to do). If I knew then what I knew now, I would have spent another year at home. I sought forbearance on the student loans I went back to work to pay down, which have since been forgiven due to my long term disability.

When I returned to the workforce in February 2006, it was through a staffing agency. There were no benefits, especially not paid sick leave. As my daughter started getting colds from her daycare, I started getting any cold that had evolved since my childhood. I was forced to bring these to work, which the client hated. Because there was no leave and no daycare, they had no leg to stand on. 

After 2006 was up, my assignment ended and I sought other assignments. During the next one, I fell and injured my elbow. I was able to work through the pain until the person I was covering for came back from maternity leave. Because I was undergoing weekly physical therapy, my agency would not assign me to another client until therapy was finished. I was not paid for my time off, nor would we take my child out of daycare (which was over $900 per month). A recently provided credit card provided spending cash, but the debt was never quite paid off until we declared bankruptcy when our condo was underwater in 2013-2014. Once we lost the house, I lost the marriage.

I was unemployed after 2011 budget cuts ended my position at Graduate School USA. I have not held a professional position since then. During that assignment, I received care from the National Institute of Health for an adrenal adenoma. The surgery was paid for, but the time off was not. 

There were a few temp assignments and a low wage job to keep food on the table, but the mortgage was not being paid. There was, of course, no leave. Indeed, although I arranged for time off, or thought I had to pack up my half of our household, I was reprimanded for missing work. Of course, there was no leave then either. I lost that job in 2015 and have been disabled ever since, with benefits starting in late 2015. Disability has allowed me to devote adequate time to submitting comments to the Revenue Committees and turning my comments to date into a series of volumes.

Attachment: Tax Reform