Sara Mauskopf
Sara Mauskopf is the co-founder and CEO of Winnie. She’s also the mom of three young children and vocal advocate for high quality child care and early education for all.
This week I had the honor of speaking at the ASU+GSV Summit, a large conference focused on innovations in education, from early childhood through to adult. Edtech has had a banner year and the market is only growing. There are now apps to teach children to read or learn another language, online classes for kids, and interactive learning games. But for our youngest learners, there’s no technology that comes close to the critical role played by our early educators. Countless studies show that young children learn best through responsive relationships with nurturing caregivers.
Despite the vital role early educators play in educating the next generation, many are underpaid. According to recent estimates, the average wage for childcare workers in the United States is $12.60 per hour, roughly equivalent to parking lot attendants, who earn an average of $13 per hour. With many industries currently facing worker shortages, childcare facilities are finding it challenging to compete with the higher wages now being offered by wealthy multinational corporations. Without enough qualified providers, centers cannot operate at full capacity, further reducing an already limited childcare supply.
The average wage for childcare workers in the United States is $12.60 per hour
So how do we fix it? Like other highly skilled, valued professions, this job should be much better compensated. To pay staff more, child care businesses could simply raise their prices, but it is well known that families across the country already struggle to afford child care. Childcare is already one of the biggest expenses faced by American families.
We need creativity and innovation to solve this problem. Some of the best childcare providers in the business are trying to do so by offering a particular benefit that has both incredible monetary and intrinsic value to parents: free childcare for their own children. It turns out that parents with children of daycare and preschool age are very attracted to positions where they can work exactly when they have child care coverage, see their kids during the day, and have their child care and educational expenses completely covered. Not to mention working at a childcare center can bump your child to the front of their long waitlist.
How important is this benefit? A recent survey from Axios found that the number one reason Americans are turning down work is due to lack of child care. This data is backed up by real life examples from employers. McDonalds recently added a child care benefit to attract low wage workers. While a benefit like this can be expensive for companies to offer, for a childcare center, the fixed costs associated with operating an onsite child care facility are already incurred. The incremental cost to reserve some spaces for the children of employees is reasonable.
There’s also a lot of opportunity to increase the efficiency of childcare businesses overall so that they have more profit to better compensate their employees. This is where tech innovation can really come into play—helping providers efficiently generate demand, reduce overhead costs, and unlock incremental revenue opportunities. Childcare businesses are still largely run offline—even some of the biggest businesses use pen and paper for operations and can unlock savings when they move to automation.
It’s also important to remember that more broadly, it’s also possible to raise wages without raising the cost for parents. As the striking example of Québec has shown, subsidized childcare can effectively pay for itself: taxes on all of the income and spending enabled by higher labor force participation in Québec more than offset the cost of providing very affordable childcare.
It’s possible to raise wages without raising the cost for parents
Countries ranging from Japan to Sweden to Australia have all adopted similar models. In the United States, proposals from Senator Elizabeth Warren as well as President Biden would both, in somewhat different ways, dramatically expand investment in the childcare sector. Biden’s American Families Plan would ensure a minimum wage of $15 for child care providers and provide subsidies for care based on family income. Warren's impressively detailed plan for universal childcare cites research from a Nobel laureate in economics and breaks down exactly how the numbers would work.
Ultimately, paying childcare workers robust wages is a humane and urgent goal in its own right. But this objective will also have important ripple effects. Paying childcare workers better will ensure top talent is attracted to the profession. It will mean child care centers can operate at capacity. It will mean more children have access to the high-quality, early education they deserve. Whether through attractive benefits like onsite childcare, tech to make childcare businesses more profitable, government support, or all of the above, we must urgently act to attract and retain our early educators.
