Who is forcing women back to work?
A modern Western lifestyle. Almost every Western country without fail requires dual incomes to afford a basic lifestyle.
The working-dad stay-at-home mum has long gone.
The median personal income in 2019 was $35,805 (cf. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N). I think you'd be hard pressed to live on that with a family of 3+ people.
And what about the 50% of people who have a personal income less than the median?
edit: that stat was for 2019, not 2020, my bad
Biggest costs of life are housing, food and transportation. With one person staying at home, both the cost of transpo and food go down (because: one less person commuting to job, everything can be home cooked and the person staying at home have time to shop smartly and save a lot thanks to it).
This lives housing costs. Here, it's all about location. In many areas (assuming renting), you can have a house or apartment suitable for a family of three for less than $1000 a month.
Before taxes. That's in the area of 2400/mo after taxes [1]. My family of 3 pays around 600/mo for health insurance after employer subsidies, so call it 1800/mo. So after rent now you're living (with an infant!) on 800 a month. That's brutal.
My newborn burns nearly that much just on formula, diapers, and life-critical medicine.
[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/paycheck-calculator#nNffey40fm
ACA has subsidies for lower income households
I have no clue how the math works on average in terms of 35k jobs offering a subsidy at all, vs the marketplace subsidy. But even at a 50% subsidy it’s still not much money to raise a family on.
3000 gross is more like 2-25 net depending on the state. I haven't been in many industries where an employer is going to be covering healthcare costs for an $18/hr employee. So for a family of 3, that's another $1,000 a month for insurance.
If one's income is as low as the parent described, they would likely be eligible for Medicaid.
The parent described the median-income earner.
In my state of Arizona, if you were grossing 36,000 a year with a family of 3 you would be about 20% over the threshold to qualify for medicaid.
Gross. More like $2200 after tax.
Healthcare for a family of 4 averaged to $1777/month in 2020[1]. The higher up the income ladder, the more the employer pays that. On the low-end, the employer doesn't pick up much of that tab. So that's the largest expense… unless it's sacrificed in order to maintain a roof, food and transportation.
And we're assuming zero contributions towards retirement, here.
So... no, it is NOT easy to live on that amount of money anywhere where there are opportunities to grow one's job/career.
[1] In 2020, annual premiums for health coverage for a family of four averaged $21,342, but employers picked up 73% of that cost. - https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-health-insurance-...
It will be remiss not to mention that America stands alone among western countries in not providing livable subsidies/incomes to recent parents, and expects them to be back in the workforce after a couple of weeks. The rest of the western world is far less aggressive in "forcing" women back to work.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/17/archives/in-soviet-union-...
Rents are too high, and wages are too low.
Would be very interesting to see actual time spent not working, and caring for children at home, in relation to amount of paid leave. And across income brackets. Would not be surprised if it comes out to more time with children in many cases even though paid leave is less..
Ah, here we go. This is a veiled "only people who have enough money should have children" argument.
> And people can and do stay at home with their children at all income levels.
I am sure that disproportionately favors certain income levels.
Also, I never said only rich people should be able to have children. However at the end of the day raising children requires money. Hence the newly introduced children tax credit.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov...
There may be some effect of the very poorest people having children for the purposes of benefits, but the vast majority of women will have fewer kids once they get access to birth control and financial independence.
I really don't get the point of doing something you don't enjoy for 8-12 hours a day just so you can have expensive things.
Not quite. $ rich people can't afford time with children.
On some level you have to encourage people to somehow try to support themselves and their children, and to adapt their footprint to match their contributions.
I mean, that’s just being a responsible parent.
that is what's wrong.
if we want a balanced society then we need to enable everyone to have children, not just those who are able to get well paying jobs.
in austria and germany this is solved with giving parents tax breaks and unconditional extra money for each child to offset the higher cost of raising children.
and if you get a minimum wage job as an animation assistant doing inbetweening work, then the laws should make sure that the minimum wage is high enough that you can afford your living costs.
combined both measures will allow you to have children.
if you are self-employed and you are not earning enough money from your art you need to apply for unemployment benefits with all the conditions related to that.
[0] If you cannot afford to unilaterally walk away from employment for several months, you have no economic power regardless of your churn rate. Sorry to break it to you.
- specific allowances (paid parental leave, paid sick leave) for obvious reasons
- "blanket" paid time off outside of federal holidays for recreation and stuff like parents dying
- extra PTO or working hours reduction to take care of sick/terminally ill relatives
- wages big enough to allow everyone working full time to save a meaningful amount of money
Most developed countries outside of the US have realized this. All countries in Europe have the first two points already covered (paid parental, sick and general time off), Germany has the third one covered since 2012 ("Familienpflegezeit").
The only thing we all seem to be lacking after decades of wage starvation and neoliberalism is the last one - but COVID-related disruption is likely to incite a massive paradigm shift as the market goes from an employer market to an employee market and companies are pulling production back on-shore for a myriad of reasons.
I don't know that I agree with the specific optimism in your last paragraph. Apart from the basic death toll, I think most of what is driving the "labor shortage" is people knocked out of situations where they were barely treading water, and retreating to lower rent areas and living with family. So wages will only rise enough to get people moving back onto the rent treadmill, and won't necessarily give away surplus wealth to increase their bargaining power. I'd love love to be wrong about this, of course.
IMO what is really needed to fix the economy is for the government to stop feeding the asset bubbles (aka giveaway to the upper class) through this ongoing combination of ZIRP plus austerity. Raising interest rates would lower asset prices, making home ownership more obtainable (despite the short term pain). And government-spent stimulus will cause distributed price inflation that will hopefully make the Fed raise rates, as opposed to the past few decades of runaway asset-only inflation that they've been able to conveniently ignore.