Already Toast by Kate Washington

Author:Kate Washington [Washington, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE VALUE OF CARE

The necessary work of family caregivers has enormous worth; remember that AARP estimate of the market value of unpaid care labor in at a staggering $470 billion? That figure comes from an estimated 37 billion hours of care, calculated at an hourly wage of just over $12.23 This figure reflects an average of about sixteen hours per week spent on care. Many caregivers’ roles demand far more time; mine certainly did. The healthcare system depends on this kind of care for countless vulnerable patients.

Despite the obvious value of this work there is no remuneration for most American caregivers. The time spent helping a family member is typically uncompensated by public programs or insurance, though there are states with programs offering caregivers economic support. Some families arrange to pay a family member by pooling resources. But our healthcare system and government programs do little, and in most cases nothing, to support caregivers. As Gail Sheehy (writing before passage of the Affordable Care Act) noted in her Passages in Caregiving: “Instead of subsidizing people who quit their jobs to take care of their loved ones, the government has slashed Medicare benefits and funding for home-health-care agencies.”24 Many agencies and insurance companies have also shifted care-related costs to families. The only benefit federally guaranteed to family caregivers—and then only to those who work for companies with more than fifty employees—is twelve weeks of unpaid leave per year via the Family and Medical Leave Act. FMLA (at which I look more closely, along with other legal resources for caregivers, in the conclusion) provides a little relief in terms of time but constitutes a de facto economic penalty for those workers who can afford to take it. Moreover, it’s not available to all workers, and in any case isn’t enough to meet the care needs of ongoing disability or eldercare, chronic illness, or someone suffering a major health crisis. “Our country has not yet recognized the importance of providing paid family leave,” says Lynn Feinberg of AARP. “Most family caregivers who are caring for someone who’s seriously ill or has a disability can’t afford to stop out of the workforce without getting a paycheck.”25

In 2020 an emergency expansion of FMLA, called FFCRA (Families First Coronavirus Response Act), required some employers to offer paid leave for coronavirus-related reasons such as self-quarantining or caring for a quarantined individual, but this expansion was temporary, lasting only to the end of the year.26 Moreover, as Joan C. Williams—director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings, College of the Law—pointed out in an August 2020 New York Times op-ed primarily focused on childcare, “Figuring out whether you’re eligible for Families First is so complicated that a chart explaining the program looks like a game of Chutes and Ladders.” Williams reports that a spike in calls to her center’s legal-resource hotline “make it clear that Families First is falling short.”27

Even before the pandemic highlighted the need for better policies around family leave and

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