Girlfriend works in childcare and I work in elder care. Fuck me double

It seems that they do understand this economy. It’s capitalism.

Don’t worry because you are free to exploit people as well! Oh, you’re not exploiting, fucking over, and scamming literally every human being you meet? What’s wrong with you. Maybe you’re just not smart enough to screw people over. /$

Two words:

Record Profits

It’s as if theres some parasitic force siphoning all those dollars somewhere . . . oh right, there is.

If you went 100 years back in time and told people that school teachers would be dead broke despite making the best financial decisions possible and be nearly homeless despite working long hours they would be fucking shocked.

Being a school teacher, even one for elementary school kids, in the late 19th century was not only a respectable profession, but also decently paid. I think Horrible Histories said that the average school teacher in the 1880s and 1890s in the UK made around 60 pounds sterling a year, which was a fairly decent wage at the time.

Stock Markets getting those record highs tho. If only people could get paid in shares of the companies that own their labor, but if that happened they’d actually have to answer to the workers and we simply can’t have that in muh free markets

Hospitals will ruin your life but most of the staff lives paycheck to paycheck.

It’s almost like there’s greedy fatcats in every industry stuffing all of the profits down their fat gullets while everyone else barely holds off starvation.

🤔

This is generating the typical anti-capitalist hate, but we should also consider that this is also a reflection on the kinds of unpaid work that women have been doing for generations. The problem isn’t necessarily profits or middle-men, it’s just that some things are always going to be expensive if people are actually paid for the work they do.

Take daycare. In the US the government says that one adult should care for no more than 3 infants, no more than 4 toddlers and no more than 7 preschoolers.

Take someone working at the US poverty line at about $15,000 per year. That’s $1250 per month. For 3 infants that’s $415 per month each, for 4 toddlers that’s $312 each, for 7 preschoolers that’s $180 each. That’s the absolute cheapest you could possibly go, where a worker is at the poverty line, and there are no costs for rent, supplies, and also zero profit.

But, as a parent, you probably don’t want the absolute lowest “bidder” to take care of your kids. You probably want someone who’s good with kids, kind, gentle, patient, etc. So, let’s not even go all the way up to the lowest possible teacher’s salary of $34,041 in Montana. Let’s say the daycare worker is great with kids, but doesn’t have the teaching background to get even the least well paying teaching job available in the country. Let’s say you’d be willing to have someone who makes $24,000 per year for easy math. That’s a wage where the caregiver is going to struggle to make ends meet in most of the country, but maybe it’s worth it for them because they like working with kids. That’s $2000 per month. For infants it’s $667 per month each or $8000 per year, toddlers it’s $500 per month each or $6000 per year. preschoolers it’s $285 per month each or about $3500 per year.

Again, this is before you consider any profits. That’s money straight from the parents to the caregiver’s salary. That’s before you consider rent, before supplies, before snacks, etc. That’s no reading nook, no library, no arts and crafts, that’s presumably just using someone’s living room.

Now, if the daycare worker is going to be able to take sick days or vacations, you’ll need to pay part of another person’s salary who will cover. So instead of 1 person watching 7 preschoolers, you have 10 people watching 70 preschoolers plus 1 who rotates in to cover when the main workers are unavailable, so make that another 10%. We’re up to almost $9k per year for an infant, and we still don’t have cribs, baby food or a cent in profit, and we have a worker who is barely scraping by.

The point is, any job that involves a lot of human supervision is going to be very expensive. Caring for babies and old or sick people involves a lot of human supervision. Much of this work used to be done by women who didn’t work outside the home. Now that women are working outside the home, even when they have young children, we’re realizing how expensive it is. None of what I’ve talked about involves capitalism or profits, it’s just purely paying someone to do child-care work while the woman does other work.

But, this is where the capitalism / socialism aspect comes in. If we want women to be able to work outside the home, and we also want kids to be something that isn’t financially ruinous, society needs to help pay for those things. In a purely capitalist, no socialism, winner-take-all world, having kids is a major liability. Having an option to not have kids is great, but in the long term society is doomed if nobody is willing to have kids anymore.