My recent starting of a job in childcare has got me thinking just how underappreciated and unappreciated childcare work really is.
Its something I must’ve forgotten - I had spent years babysitting, nannying - as an alternate means of money for my education. I watched friends struggle with trying to pay for quality childcare - try to find space in a daycare, try to pay for it. Many other childcare workers I knew often ran daycares out of their own homes, under the table, because space was so high in demand. Yet, the amounts they were paid were still so slim. How does a parent on a low yearly salary, sometimes minimum wage, afford childcare if workers hope to be paid mimimum wage or ideally more?
Its all come rushing back to me now as I spent nearly 30 hours a week doing childcare, trying to balance it with my thesis work, in addition to other paid and unpaid work at the University.
When I began this job in November, one of my friends in particular would regularly make comments about how I should quit the job, there’s better things to do. Or if the new job interferred with my on-campus responsibilities - the on-campus work was always deemed more important according to this friend.
Similarily, talking to my grandma on the phone a few days ago - she asked me “oh Artemis, you must be able to find a better job than babysitting? Something that pays more?”
“But Grandma, I’m getting paid more than minimum wage…”
“Oh. Well, you must be able to find something better to do? More interesting? You have so many skills…”
Sigh.
So why the backlash on childcare? Its something I’ve never really understood.
What it all comes down to though, is that childcare has always been the primary responsibility of women. And, as belonging to women, has so been made to be inadequate. Unimportant. Less skilled. Lower. Certainly paid lower on the pay scale of things. But most importantly, deemed of a lower status because it is women’s work - it is not “real” work.
This of course is the battle now that we have to face not only in our own lives, but in politics. Fighting for universal, paid childcare in Canada is something that is not going to come easy while Harper is in government. But the benefits of it - for families, parents, children - and yes, childcare workers who might actually see themselves being paid good wages, actually have jobs - is so important.
And while I don’t have time to write or explain fully now the atrocities of the Harper plan for supposed “universal childcare” - $100/month for each family, yup that’s the whole cost of childcare - Paul Mitchinson has a fabulous post that explains fully the intricacies and atrocities of the current plan and what is truly needed.
This, is my morning thought, as I roll out of bed, drink my coffee, and walk 20-minutes to work to spend the day with the kiddies.
-Artemis.
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