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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. As always, it's good to have you with us. Just a quick note here that over the weekend, the first major storm of the season, Hurricane Fiona made landfall in Puerto Rico. The Island's fragile infrastructure is still recovering from the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria back in 2017. On Sunday, the winds and rains of Fiona left millions of Puerto Ricans without electricity and much of the Island remains under a flash flood advisory even as Fiona has moved on to the Dominican Republic.

Here at The Takeaway, our thoughts are with the people of Puerto Rico and all in the path of Fiona. We're asking you to remember to stay tuned to your local public radio station for updates as the situation develops.

Now, we're going to shift gears a bit, and we're going to talk about a very different kind of crisis. In a recent investigative piece for Early Learning Nation, Bryce Covert explains that across the United States childcare providers are losing staff to large private corporations, including fast food restaurants and big-box stores. About 88,000 fewer people are employed in the childcare industry than before the start of the pandemic. This worker shortage is having real effects.

Childcare workers typically earn less than school teachers with an average pay of about $14 an hour, which amounts to a little more than $29,000 a year, and that is just slightly above the US poverty level for a family of four. Despite this low pay, those who care for our youngest children are the very foundation of the American economy because they enable parents of young children to work. We'll hear from some of you about just how important your childcare providers are to your families.

Maya: Hello, my name is Maya, and I'm calling from Oakland. I had a childcare provider named Max who was an absolute lifesaver during the first year of the pandemic. They made the difference between my child's success in school and helped me not feel isolated and just grateful to have community. Childcare providers make the world go round.

Female Speaker: We have a son who has autism. He is now 32. We have had a provider who has been with us since he was three. When he was small, he had a lot of behavioral issues. It was hard to manage him. As he has grown, he has gotten so used to her. She is a part of our family, and we could never have gone anywhere away from him had we not trusted her and loved her as a member of our family.

Kay: Hi, this is Kay from the Bronx, and I just wanted to express that daycare services are truly an essential service, and you would see during the pandemic the first thing that was set up for essential workers was daycare services. That's the first thing that allowed me to return to the hospital and carry out my work, because without it we're just not able to function. I'm hoping that one day the federal government would recognize how crucial this is and will just make a universal program.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thank you for letting us know about the ways you rely on your childcare providers, but what happens when this crucial support is not available?

Bryce Covert: My name is Bryce Covert. I'm an independent journalist writing about the economy.

Khulood Jamil: My name is Khulood Jamil. I'm the owner of Khulood's Child Care.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Bryce, I want to start with you. What is going on with the staffing problem in child care? Why is it so acute?

Bryce Covert: Well, it's been a problem for a long time. As listeners may know, child care is a really challenging business to be in. It's one where the costs are fixed and the amount that providers can charge parents, it's hard to raise that without imposing hardship and possibly losing them, but that has now run headlong into the current economic conditions we're in. First of all, the pandemic came, a lot of places had to shut their doors and staff didn't necessarily return after that. The staff has also been asked to go above and beyond, take on health risks by coming in, take temperatures, do extra cleaning, so some people left for that reason.

Then now you've got the very tight labor market where lots of employers are struggling to compete and to hire people, but in child care, because there are basically razor-thin margins, it's not like providers really have anywhere to go to find extra money to pay more and attract those employees when large corporations like Walmart, like Target can pony up, they can pay $20 an hour starting potentially.

These are for jobs where, not to dismiss the work that people put in there, but they're not fostering children's development, wiping runny noses, possibly having to go through background checks. These are difficult jobs that people do in early education. These factors have all just combined to create a really acute staffing crisis. I've been reporting on child care for a while, and this year, every conversation I had with a provider, the staffing issue came up every single time.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, Khulood, you're a childcare provider, can you start by telling me a little bit about your center, about Khulood's Child Care?

Khulood Jamil: Yes. I opened my Child Care in 1996 as a small family child care, which is I don't need staffing, but in 1998, there was a big demand to have more children, and I extended from small child care, which is you could have up to eight children, to large family child care, which is we could have up to 14 children. This was the biggest issue starting since then. Always it's hard to find an employee because of the rate pay and then also because we don't offer that great benefits, health insurance or retirement.

Other big corporations can do that so we always try to accommodate the need of my staff, but still, if they find another job in Starbucks or Target or anywhere else, yes, of course, they will leave us and go. For us as a family childcare provider, it's really hard to hire anyone.

All employees have to go to certain things. This is the license regulation. It's not a choice. They have to do background check, criminal record check, all the vaccinations, not just COVID but the TB test, the whooping cough, the measles, a lot of requirements. For example, if a staff call on sick, I have to close the child care. I have to call the parents and tell them I don't have staff today, because by regulation, I cannot run the child care by myself. By the regulation, I cannot bring a neighbor to watch the children.

Everyone close to the children have to do all these. First, a PCR, TB test, a lot. There's a list of what to do to be close to an infant or a toddler or a preschool age. Yes, we are suffering, and it's a big, big issue always, but 2020, when the COVID hit us, it's become even worse.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You know, as I'm listening to you, Khulood, Bryce, I want to bring you in again, because on the one hand I understand all of these regulations. My youngest is now in Third Grade, but it wasn't that long ago we were dealing with childcare questions like this. Yes, I want the background checks. It makes perfect sense to me these health regulations. On the other hand, as I'm listening to Khulood speak, I think, "Oh, of course, I get it." There will always be times when someone is going to be sick and will be out and then suddenly the whole center is closed.

Bryce: Right. I think you have to look at the big differences between the way we treat child care and early education and the way we treat K through 12 education. Teachers also do not make a whole lot of money, but they tend to get better benefits, and they are definitely paid better than childcare providers. That is in part because the government steps in and it funds public education, whereas, when it comes to child care, basically it's all private other than Head Start and some government subsidies that reach small fraction of families.

It's a completely private market where it's just between the providers and the families, and families can't afford to pay what it really costs to provide care and to treat these employees with the kind of wages and benefits that they deserve for the work that they do. Like you said, we don't want to get rid of these regulations. You want to make sure that there are enough adults in the classroom to adequately care for children. You want to make sure that they are trained, that they are vaccinated, that they're ready for this work, but we also want to make sure that they're compensated well, and providers just don't have the profits to do that. This is really a failed market where the government just has to step in.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Walk me through that a little bit. Why did you make the choice to go into child care? I hear you saying that you lose employees to a Starbucks, to a Target, but I'm wondering, it can be a bit of a calling to do this work with young children. I'm wondering if your employees are just feeling like they have no choice but to leave and if they're a little sad about having to go?

Khulood: Well, let me tell you a short story about how did I start this business. In 1995, I came to the States, and my background, I'm a CPA, I'm an accountant. This is my diploma. Then I bring it with me, applied for Wells Fargo Bank, and I applied also for a military base in Monterey, California, to be a translator there, but at that time I had two little girls. I'm immigrant to this country. I was scared to leave them alone for long, long hours. I want to be there for them.

People actually started to knock on my door, and say, "Oh, we know that you have children." I said, "Those are my two girls." I started with a little boy, nine-month-old. Then after that people started to knock on my door. I said, "Okay, let me go get the license." I get my license and start from there. Then after one year, this was 1996, after one year, I said, "Let me go to school and change my major." I changed it to Early Childhood and Psychology. Then I found myself that I'm in love with babies and know how their brain develops, how they grow. I feel that my job has a meaning, have a good result.

Me and my other providers, we are building the community. We are taking care of your children. You are not handing me a computer. You are not handing me a book. You are handing me your child, the most important thing in your life. You're giving me this child, to take care of him. I have children three-month-old up to five years old. With the 2020, we didn't close our door at all, the family child care. Centers-- Head Start, they had to close, but we didn't.

I have a family who are police officers. I have a family who are nurse in UCSF. I have a family who are doctors. Those, they still continue to do their great job by leaving their most precious things in my child care with me. They don't have to worry, "Oh, where I'm going to put my child? To go to work." They are with us.

Then, the problem is, yes, we, if you count how much we make, we're doing less than minimum wage. How come I can pay my assistants like a big corporation? I cannot. I wish I could pay my assistants $50 an hour. They deserve it. They really deserve it. We all work together hand by hand to raise the community, but from where I could pay them? This year, I gave my assistants a big raise, but I took 20% from my paycheck.

If my husband is not working, I cannot live in the Bay Area no matter what. I depend on him for my health benefits and to cover some of the house expense. If it's just by myself, this is the job that I do for 27 years, I cannot live by it. Even when I ask, when I hire someone, what should I tell them? Come and live in poverty? Then the same time the bills for the parents is the most expensive bill after the mortgage or maybe with the mortgage.

If you have two children and you pay $3000 a month or so or less, I don't know. It depends which city you are. Some cities charge a lot. Some cities, in different zip code, they cannot charge that much, so it's really hard. It's really, really hard. We are stuck in between two rocks and we've been squeezed. I love this job, and I don't want to leave it. I searched for a while thinking what else should I do? Then, no, I don't want to change this. I love seeing children growing between my arms, seeing them from three months to five years old, how the brain develops, how they grow, how they walk, how they talk, teaching them the numbers, the letters, they start to write.

It's all this in front of my eyes, is the best job ever. The sadness is the government don't pay attention for the childcare sectors. They feel, still some people feel that "because I didn't find any other job, so what should I do? I did that." It's absolutely wrong. Most of us went back to school. We have a degree. I have a degree from before, but I changed it to Early Childhood and Psychology.

This is the majority. To be honest, the majority is the private business. Who got subsidized kids is less than 20%. Head Start, less than 20%. The majority is private, and we don't get help at all from anyone. We have to serve food, and this has to be healthy food. I cannot serve junk food at all. I cook vegetarian food [unintelligible 00:15:05] to the children. Then, of course, if a child wants second bowl or third bowl, I will give him that. I don't want children starve in my child care at all.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Bryce, why is there so little investment for this critical moment for our children?

Bryce: I wish I knew. A lot of it I think has to do with the way we've divided child care from the rest of the education children receive after they turn five years old, which is pretty much a false dichotomy. A lot of it is the politics in this country around government programs and the way we tend to think of them as only benefiting the poor and thinking of the poor as only being people of color and the racial animus that that can inspire, because lots of other countries have done a better job than we have. Not just Scandinavian companies but countries Canada, the UK, many of our peers have addressed this in a way that we haven't.

As Khulood was saying, without the government doing more, childcare providers are really stuck between a rock and a hard place, and it's such a tragedy for them, and it's also a tragedy for families and for children.

We know we have so many reams of data and studies showing that these are the most critical years for people's development. That so much happens in the early years, that's critical for the rest of their lives, and also that investing in children at this time of their lives through quality education, through quality child care pays dividends later on. It's not like it's a bad investment to be making. It's a very smart investment and a humane investment. It's just politically for some reason it's one that we have not made.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Bryce, I want to just push on that one more time. I hear your point around how we imagine government programs. I wonder also if this is gendered, even as Khulood is speaking about her degree, about her professionalism, if we also just perceive, "Oh, well, women taking care of young children is somehow a natural extension of mothering care or domestic work that really doesn't even need to be paid, and when it is paid, is always paid at such a low wage.

Bryce: Absolutely. I would say it's gendered in two ways. Of course, like you're saying, the vast majority of childcare providers and those who work in this industry are women. They are also majority women of color, and in care work like this, we do tend to just assume that people will just do it out of the good of their hearts, that they don't need to be compensated for it, it's just something that women do, it's just something that comes naturally.

Certainly, I think the people who do it, like Khulood, have passion for it, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be compensated well for it. Then the other side of the gender coin is that the politics around young children and working mothers have always been complicated in our country and elsewhere. There has been a long debate about whether it's okay for women to send their children to child care and whether they should instead drop out of the workforce and stay home with them.

I think that childcare investment sometimes gets tangled up in that, although the politics of that I think have shifted as so many more women are in the labor force working and so many families rely on two incomes to get by, I think it's become a little bit of a no-brainer that children need a high-quality place to go during the workday, but that is some of what's made this more complicated, perhaps.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Khulood, I'm wondering I'm sure there are some folks who will say, "Why not just raise your prices? You've got these parents, they need to send their child to you. You seem to be doing really wonderful and caring work. Charge them more money."

Khulood: Ah, I wish I could, because our prices are already high. Not everyone can afford paying $400, $500 a week. It's too much. What if they have the second child. How much we could charge? How much we could raise our tuition? We cannot. There are standards. Then, for example, let me ask a question. A bottle of soda you bought it from Safeway, is $1 are. Are you going to buy it from another grocery store with $5 a bottle? So, we cannot raise. There is a cap, this is the how we could charge.

Yes, we are private. I could charge $1000 a week. No one can tell me anything but I cannot because I will not find any parents. Then I have a feeling for those parents too. I put myself in their shoes. We always think about them. It's not I work in a company, is different. It's different. There is this relationship between me and the family. I have their children minimum 10 hours a day. My hours is 11 hours a day, so minimum I'll have them 10 hours. They trust me with their children. How I'm going to charge them that much and see them struggling? They cannot, they cannot.

Let me make comments about what Bryce said. I got a quote from my sister yesterday, she sent me something. She said, "It's easier to build strong children than to repair a broken man." This is said by Frederick Douglass, and it's absolutely true. We, the family childcare provider, trying our best to raise little ones in their first five years, and I'm sure that everyone knows that these first five years are the most important years.

This is where the brain develops and the cells connect so rapidly, so we are trying to put in those children the respect, the knowledge, the kindness, the responsibility of taking care of everything. I talk with the children about plants around us. I talk with the children how to save the water when we wash our hands; the electricity, if we don't need the light, then we'll turn off the light because-- always there's because after that, and I make lessons and curriculums about these things, how to save the fish and the whales and the sharks which they love if we keep the water running?

I do all these things on a daily basis, plus all the academic things, the math and science and language, all that that we all know about it, but we have to do above and beyond. In 2020, when the children, some of them stayed home with their parents, they were scared, but they asked for my food. Then I was cooking lunch for the children who still came to my child care and for those who were not. Then when the children nap, I have my assistants stay with them and then I go deliver this food to their door because they are missing my food and they refuse to eat other-- They want the rice and the soup that Ms. Khulood does with the vegetables.

It's been a great relationship with the parents. You work with the children. I don't know what else can I say. I don't know how come the lawmakers don't pay attention for us. As Bryce said, in other countries, in Europe, is totally different. We are here in the US, the best country in the whole world, number one country. We really, really need to push so hard.

Last weekend, I went to Washington, DC, to attend a meeting with the Childcare Changemakers. Those are great organization helping us to advocate to talk to the lawmakers about the childcare sectors, how we need the help from the government to establish health benefits, to establish a retirement plan for us. Yes, we will pay for that.

I'm not asking to be free 100%, but just like any other company, maybe the union can support us. Someone support us to start a health benefit and a retirement not just for subsidized families, for all family childcare providers, all, because we all do the same job. We all treat the children equally. I don't treat the child different because his family are needy, poor people, and then I treat the other child who has parents making good money differently. I'm teaching the children, all of them, the same. All of them. I deserve and other providers, all of us, deserve what we are doing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Bryce, can you talk about the end of the Child Tax Credit? We know that it had this extraordinary effect of lifting so many millions of children out of poverty, cutting child poverty in half. That Child Tax Credit was allowed to expire. I'm wondering the extent to which that expiration is also affecting what we're seeing here in terms of both the capacity of families to even pay for child care.

Bryce: It's certainly not helping. As you pointed out, the Child Tax Credit that was expanded and sent out monthly last year under the American Rescue Plan did just an enormous amount to reduce poverty and hardship and hunger among many, many American families. I will say it was an important amount of money. It was not nearly as much as people need to be able to cover the costs of child care, so I'd imagine it helped on the margins. It was not the kinds of amounts that people need to pay for child care, but it can't be helping this current situation.

The other thing that's happened though and perhaps is even more salient is that under the American Rescue Plan, there was also funding that went to states to try to rescue the childcare industry, to give them grants, to stabilize them, to try to expand, and that I have heard from providers really went a long way. One provider I spoke to for my piece said she was actually able to raise pay this year and attract people to hire through those payments, but the problem is those were one-time payments, and those have to be used, I believe, by 2026. That money is going to be gone really soon.

What people had hoped was that there would be more behind it when Democrats included childcare investment in the Build Back Better reconciliation package. Then that got stripped out from what they actually eventually ended up passing, so now, providers are left in this predicament of having this really acute staffing crisis. Like you said, the Child Tax Credit is not there helping families have more money in their pockets and the investment that this country made is about to dry up. Unless someone steps in, it's only going to get worse.

Melissa Harris-Perry: One more piece on policy, Bryce. I'm wondering sometimes we go directly at a problem and sometimes it's that there are these other structural aspects that would have a tremendous effect. I'm thinking, for example, Khulood's point about benefits, if there were more expansive accessibility for health insurance that didn't require it being connected with the employer, would that make a difference here?

Bryce: Yes, I think that would make a difference if health care were something that everyone could get and it didn't necessarily have to go through an employer like a childcare provider who may want to provide it and can't financially.

Something like paid family leave for everyone would also help so then people would have pay if they needed to take time off of work, but I think those things still would need to be coupled with investment here because even if you have benefits in these jobs, which absolutely is important and these providers deserve, they're still making minimum wage usually, and these jobs and its importance, what it demands of you, what you're giving to the community, it really is so much more than minimum wage.

It's a problem that's been broken for a long time. I think as with many things, the pandemic has just really shown a very bright light on it. My hope is that that leads to some reconsideration of the way we do that in this country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Khulood, let me ask this. If you had many more resources and were able to pay a fair wage or maybe benefits, what would be the package that you would offer to assistants to make sure that you could retain them and not lose them to a Starbucks or a Target?

Khulood: As Bryce said, we are getting the minimum or actually under the minimum wage if you calculate it because our bills are so high. My PG&E bills is so high, the electricity bill, because I have to have the heater and the air cooler at a certain degree by licensing, by regulation to keep the children in a great temperature. Also, the water, it's really getting high, and if you spend above that much amount, is also like I get more price on each [unintelligible 00:28:38] we spend because the children wash their hands a lot, flush the toilet out, all these expenses.

If I can offer my assistants like $20 or more with the benefits, with the retirement, of course, they will stay because they love babies. When you work with babies and the babies smile on your face and give you a hug in the morning, this is the best feeling in the whole world. Parents came, knock on my door and then the child sees our faces and then they just laugh, and they throw themself on us and give us big hug and because we pad their back, they start to do that. They pad our back too. This is the best feeling from babies, from innocent children.

Before they leave, when their parents come to pick them up, they don't want to leave. Hug, hug, hug. They run after us and they give each teacher a hug. The teachers love this. No one can work with the children if they don't have the patience and the passion for children. We all have this, but when they leave the job, it's just because they need to put food on their table too. They have a family, they have expenses, and we live in the Bay Area. I hope that the lawmakers don't think that "Okay, leave the Bay Area if it's too expensive." It doesn't work like that. It doesn't work like that.

We need them to pay attention for us. I don't know how come they don't think like that. They don't think that we are building the community, we are building the United States. They've been babies before. They have the children, they have grandchildren. "Don't you think about that? Why you only think about kindergarten and above? How about the first five years? Where did those children go?"

I had to close my child care for a day or two in June this year because two of my assistants had emergencies. One had a death in the family. One was in the emergency room. Then I don't have anyone, and I couldn't run my child care. Who should I choose from the parents?

You stay home and you bring your child, so if I have six or less, I could do it by myself. I couldn't do that. Do you know how much struggle the parents went through? They went through big, big struggle with that because at 7:00 AM in the morning, I open my door at 7:30. I have to give them a text and a call, "This is the situation. I'm very sorry." I cried that weekend, it was Friday. I cried that weekend. On Sunday, I went to the store near my home, grocery store, near my home, bought flowers, chocolate, and a thank you card for the parents.

That one day of closing not just let me lose the wages for that day, but I paid from my own money to say thank you for the parents and "I appreciate your understanding for what happened on Friday," and it's not my fault. I was there, I wasn't sick, nothing happened with me, but I didn't have staff on that day. As I said, there is no agency that I could call and then they have people already and then I bring them to my school, said, "Okay, Sam, go to Khulood's Child Care because she needs someone today." We don't have this in our field, we don't.

Everyone hires someone, and then even the hiring process, if I talk, I will talk from now to tomorrow, it's not easy. It's really hard to find people, and after we find those great assistants, it's really hard to keep them because of the minimum wage, because of the benefits. It's really we need a system to help the early childhood in this country, in the great country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Khulood Jamil, thank you for joining us today.

Khulood: Thank you for letting me talk with you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Bryce Covert, thank you as well for joining us today.

Bryce: Thank you for having me on.

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