[Care for children, the elderly and disabled is among the
lowest-paying industries. Poo thinks federal investment could become
reality.]
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LABOR LEADER AI-JEN POO CONFRONTS ’THE BIGGEST DRIVER OF ECONOMIC
INEQUALITY THAT NOBODY TALKS ABOUT.  
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Jessica Goodheart
December 7, 2023
Capital & Main
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_ Care for children, the elderly and disabled is among the
lowest-paying industries. Poo thinks federal investment could become
reality. _

Ai-jen Poo speaks at the 2021 “Welcome Back Congress" rally in
Washington, D.C. , Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Unbendable Media

 

AI-JEN POO, A LABOR ORGANIZER and president of the National Domestic
Workers Alliance, has been shining the spotlight on the crisis of care
in the United States for almost three decades. She advocates for some
of the nation’s lowest paid workers — those who tend to our
children, the elderly and the disabled.

Last year, her efforts to shore up the country’s fragmented and
underfunded care infrastructure nearly resulted in a
multibillion-dollar federal investment. The infrastructure proposal
President Joe Biden presented to Congress included universal
pre-kindergarten, home health care for seniors and child care tax
credits. But the Build Back Better Act did not make it through a
closely divided Senate after having passed the House of
Representatives
[[link removed]]. 

Capital & Main spoke to Poo via Zoom about that fight and her ongoing
efforts to bring more dignity to the working lives of caregivers and
those who depend on them. Poo, who also directs Caring Across
Generations, a national movement of caregivers and care recipients,
conveyed a steady optimism about the prospects for large-scale federal
investment in care work. “We are ascendant,” she said. State-level
initiatives and grassroots campaigns led by home care workers are key
to driving federal policy change, Poo said. 

_This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity._

CAPITAL & MAIN: NEARLY EVERYONE IS AFFECTED BY CAREGIVING, REGARDLESS
OF WHO YOU ARE OR YOUR POLITICAL BELIEFS. HAVE YOU BEEN ABLE TO MAKE
THIS AN ISSUE THAT TRANSCENDS POLITICS?

AI-JEN POO: There isn’t a room that I go into where people don’t
have very immediate, very emotional stories about caring for a parent
with dementia or a child with a disability, or just all the mom rage
that’s out there. This is such a widely and a deeply felt issue
across so many different segments of our population, and our
electorate.

Republican voters support these issues. The [issue] polls
[[link removed]] through
the roof. They support having higher taxes or having a bigger role for
government, because across partisan lines, despite distrust in
government, people really feel like this is a place where we need
societal systems to support us.
 

“Access to care is the difference between a person with a disability
being able to live a full life in the community and potentially even
work, and not. It’s life or death.”

 
What are the benefits of investing in care work?

There’s an economist at Harvard named Larry Katz who calls
[improving care jobs] “triple dignity investments.” It is not only
investing in her ability to support herself and her family. Those are
job-enabling jobs that make it possible for working parents and
working family caregivers to get to work.

Then, there are the people [receiving] care: the children, the people
with disabilities and the older adults [who are] able to have the kind
of quality of life that only comes through having care available.

[Investing in care work] delivers human potential and agency. It
delivers a future workforce. It delivers quality of life. 

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE U.S. OF HAVING AN INADEQUATE CARE
INFRASTRUCTURE?

I think it’s the biggest driver of inequality that nobody talks
about. We live in an aging society, where 10,000 people turn 65 every
day
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people are living longer, and chronic illnesses associated with aging
like dementia and Alzheimer’s are exploding to epidemic levels. The
only way that people can get access to long-term care is to completely
impoverish themselves to be eligible for Medicaid.

The workforce in this industry is 87% women
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majority women of color, who are also caregivers for family members.
That means that all the ways in which inequity shows up along the
lines of race and gender in our economy are compounded by the lack of
any kind of assistance or investment in care.

It’s a huge obstacle to women’s participation in the workforce, to
wealth building and economic mobility for working class people and
working poor people, and there’s a huge toll in terms of our mental
health, our physical health, health outcomes for our aging loved ones
and our loved ones with disabilities. Access to care is the difference
between a person with a disability being able to live a full life in
the community and potentially even work, and not. It’s life or
death.

THE INFLATION REDUCTION ACT GOT OVER THE FINISH LINE IN PART BY
STRIPPING THE ELEMENTS THAT ADDRESS THE CRISIS IN CARE. WHAT DOES THAT
SAY ABOUT HOW THE ISSUE IS BEING PRIORITIZED BY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?

We almost won an unprecedented, transformational investment in care
that no one would’ve expected would even be on the table. [The U.S.
House of Representatives passed]-Build Back Better bill included a new
paid family medical leave program, hundreds of billions
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dollars for child care and for aging and disability care in the home.
Three-quarters of a trillion dollars on the table, and two years
previous: Zero dollars on the table. We almost won a generational,
transformational investment.

We’re still ascendant. President Biden signed the most
sweeping executive order
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history on care on April 18 of this year, signaling that this was
going to stay a priority. It included over 50 directives to every
federal agency to do whatever is within their power, short of the
funding that only Congress can offer, to expand access to care, to
support family caregivers, to improve wages and conditions for the
workforce.

And we’re seeing a huge demand from states. Washington launched
its long-term care benefit
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In November 2022, New Mexico passed a ballot initiative
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permanently fund child care in its state budget. There is undeniable
momentum. Every day, I feel like I’m hearing from new corners of the
movement how we’re growing. The fact that we didn’t make it into
the Inflation Reduction Act shouldn’t have surprised anyone because
we were never supposed to be in it to begin with. But we pushed our
way in, and I think we’re next. There’s no question.
 

“President Biden signed the most sweeping executive order in history
on care on April 18 of this year, signaling that this was going to
stay a priority.”

 
What role have care workers played in addressing this issue?

It’s huge. That’s what’s driven a lot of the success that
we’ve had in the care movement is care worker organizing. In New
York, care workers and consumers are organizing together in the Fair
Pay for Home Care
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that won a $3-an-hour wage increase for home care workers in the
state. In North Carolina, our home care worker members have been
organizing for years to raise the wages and the reimbursement rates in
the Medicaid home care system and have finally started to make some
headway in the pandemic.

But that’s years of organizing, and it’s all being driven by
workers, mostly Black women in the South. In New Mexico, our members,
who are a mix of Latina, Indigenous and white women care workers, were
successful in passing a measure that would set the stage for an
increased amount of the reimbursement rates to go to wages. These are
mechanisms that are so challenging and hard to navigate at the
legislative level, budget level, funding level, and workers are
organizing and passing laws to try to, step by step, make it possible
for these jobs to become jobs that are better paid.

WHY ISN’T THIS WORK MORE HIGHLY VALUED?

I think it has a lot to do with who this work is associated with.
Mostly women, women of color. And it also has to do with a deeply held
cultural belief that care is a responsibility that we should shoulder
on our own as families and individuals. And if for some reason we
can’t figure it out on our own, we can’t afford it, or we can’t
manage it, or we can’t find it, we consider it a personal failure.
So, it’s often experienced as a crisis of personal failures as
opposed to a system failure.

IS THERE ANOTHER COUNTRY BESIDES THE U.S. THAT HAS A STRONG CARE
INFRASTRUCTURE?

Everything is imperfect. [But] if you think of the pillars of the care
economy as paid family medical leave, child care, aging and disability
care, and good care jobs for workers who work in the care economy,
those four pillars, if you look at almost every developed nation —
in Europe, Japan, Canada — everybody’s ahead of us.

In Latin America, Uruguay has universal access to these programs …
It’s not just in wealthy countries.

_Copyright 2023 Capital & Main, reposted with permission._

_JESSICA GOODHEART is a senior reporter at Capital & Main. She has
written for the Los Angeles Times, the L.A. Reader and UPI, among
other publications. Prior to joining Capital & Main, she worked at
the L.A. Alliance for a New Economy, where she served as research
director, authoring numerous reports on labor, employment and economic
issues. At LAANE she ran a successful campaign that led to a more
than doubling of investment in energy efficiency programs at the
nation’s largest municipally owned utility and the creation of a
jobs program for disadvantaged communities. She is also a poet whose
work has appeared in the Best American Poetry, the Antioch
Review and in a full-length collection, Earthquake
Season, which was published by Word Press._

_CAPITAL & MAIN is an award-winning nonprofit publication that reports
from California on the most pressing economic, environmental and
social issues of our time.  Winner of the 2016 Online Journalist of
the Year prize from the Southern California Journalism Awards and a
2017 Best in the West award, Capital & Main has had
stories co-published in more than 30 media outlets, from The
Atlantic, Time, Reuters, The Guardian and Fast Company to The
American Prospect, Grist, Slate and the Daily Beast. Working with
top writers, editors and visual artists, we cover income inequality,
climate change, the green economy, housing, health care, public
education, immigration, race, and criminal justice. Capital & Main is
a 501(c)3 tax exempt organization._

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* Inequality
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* homecare
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* Healthcare
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* women workers
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* long-term care
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* unions
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