Joyce Fegan: The 'march of the mummies' has begun
Elaine Dunne, (centre, wearing black suit) chair of The Federation of Early Childhood Providers during a protest outside the Dáil and a march to the Department of Children, Baggot Street on Wednesday calling for increases in funding. Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin
At the height of the media attention on the MeToo movement in 2017, there was one shrewd commentator who said it was all actually about labour rights: Safety in the workplace, dignity in the workplace, and equal pay in the workplace.
Right now, in Ireland, the UK, and America there are large public conversations taking place about childcare — its cost, creche closures, staff shortages, staff burnout, and mothers in the main retiring prematurely and involuntarily in order to alleviate this crisis in care.
Next door, nursery closures made TV headlines on BBC News this week. The "childcare sector is on the brink of collapse," Joeli Brearley told the BBC.
As founder of Pregnant Then Screwed, a charity and campaign group working to end the motherhood penalty, she is contacted daily by women whose children's nurseries are closing and who now have no option but to leave the workforce.
These nurseries just can't afford to run their outfits anymore, and when they notify the parent of their closure, that parent then cannot find an alternate place elsewhere, because it's not just one creche affected, it's many.
Parents, mothers mostly, are leaving the labour market, and "it's good for no one", Brearley told the BBC.
Brearley herself was let go from her job while pregnant.
You can hear the BBC presenter caught off guard when her question as to what alternate options these mothers were finding, is met with "well nothing", they're just leaving the labour market.
Brearley cites state investment in childcare in countries like Switzerland, Japan and Australia, because they recognise childcare as "critical infrastructure to the economy" while in the UK, despite warnings of the sector's collapse, there is no government plan whatsoever.
Pregnant Then Screwed, which offers free employment advice to mothers, is organising marches across the UK in October to demand the following: Affordable childcare, flexible working, and paid parental leave.
It's being called The March of the Mummies.
There was a protest in Ireland this week too, by childcare workers, not parents, outside Dáil Éireann.
Budget 2023 will be announced next month, and childcare is expected to get a huge cash boost.
Minister for Children Roderic O'Gorman vowed to “substantially cut” the cost of childcare for all parents in the upcoming budget. Compared to our neighbours next door, the man is at the races, listening, and legislating.
So why did creche workers and owners picket the Dáil on Wednesday?
As part of the new "core funding" scheme of €221m, childcare and early-learning services signing up need to agree to freeze fees at September 2021 levels.
With rising costs of living for their workers, the housing crisis, and increasing electricity rates, owners of creches said it was impossible to do so.
What was striking about the owners' grievances was the fact that it was not about them, but their employees' lives and the children for whom they care.
Owners wanted to increase their staff wages so they could "get on track" for a mortgage, but how can they do that if fees are frozen, they asked.
Others said the field is populated predominantly by women, who have to fight for pay that accurately reflects their education and work.
Many entry-level retail jobs pay more than childcare work, even though no Level 8 degrees are required, nor are things like emotional labour by way of regulating "toddler tantrums" or negotiating the sharing of precious objects between small humans.
And in the US this week, president Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes parts of his "Build Back Better" vision, think president Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal series of programmes aimed at restoring prosperity to Americans in the 1930s.
Biden's new law will see major investment in climate action, the lowering of prescription drug prices, and the cost of healthcare, and an investment in green transport infrastructure.
"Infrastructure isn’t only sustainable modes of transportation," Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance wrote in
this week in response.
"Fair pay for caregiving would free up more Americans to take part in the economy," she added.
Care workers enable many, many other people to go to work. Only in most parts of the world, we either pay them a pittance or nothing at all.
And this strikes me as so strange, when you look at the innumerable value they are adding to our society and economy.
All research points to the importance of early childhood care, how the bedrock of mental health and healthy attachment is formed in those crucial early years.
This early bedrock contributes to lower rates of crime later on, higher education, better employment prospects and well-rounded human beings.
Ai-jen Poo's piece in The New York Times, in response to the Biden administration leaving family leave, childcare subsidies and a wage increase for care workers out of the game-changing legislation, was titled: "How Long Will the US Continue to Disrespect Its Caregivers?"
Just like the MeToo's movement's link to labour rights, the crisis in care is too connected to workers' rights — how much we are willing to pay them, the employment benefits we give them, and how we value them.
In Ireland, you have creche owners picketing the Dáil, in the UK you have "mummies" marching and in the US you have an apparently progressive piece of legislation leaving out care work entirely.
You have to ask: How long will societies the world over continue to disrespect their caregivers?
And when you look at all of the people and organisations agitating for change in this fundamental area that affects almost all of our lives, from Pregnant Then Screwed to Mother Pukka and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, they're all talking about labour rights, especially women's.
You have the women who were educated using public funds and who built careers and paid lots of tax, inadvertently leaving the workforce at motherhood, and you have the care workers earning low wages for highly valuable work.
Something's got to give, and while it's currently the income and therefore independence of mostly women, let's not forget that precious developing humans are caught up in the crossfire of our unwillingness to pay proper money to those who provide the invaluable labour of care work.
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