Like all of you, I’ve had eyes glued to the shutdown, and its disastrous consequences for children and families. But Janet Yellen’s child care story distracted me.
This week, she was nominated by President Obama to succeed Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve. In my admittedly unscientific survey, Yellen’s distinction as “first woman to hold the job” trumped economic theory in the ballyhoo that ensued. Then we got down to brass tacks. My level of economic literacy is low, akin to some of those infamous U.S. PISA scores. And monetary policy is like Greek to me. So I’ll leave that part of the discussion to , who, nonetheless, began his New York Times article on the world according to the new nominee with this mundane, but riveting, detail:
When the economists Janet L. Yellen and George A. Akerlof hired a baby sitter for their son in the early 1980s, they decided to pay more than the going wage. They reasoned that a happier baby sitter would provide better care.
Apparently, when Yellen and her husband were looking for child care in the summer of 1981, they posted a classified ad in The Daily Californian promising “Good pay.” At the time, in a collision of the personal and the professional, they were also studying the persistence of unemployment, upon which they expounded in a series of jointly written papers. Noting that people often overpaid baby sitters, they articulated the connections among decent pay, better morale, and higher productivity. In times of unemployment, Yellen argued, companies are acutely aware of the effect of wage cuts on employee behavior. “Would they quit or feel dissatisfied and work less hard on the firm’s behalf,” she asked in a 1995 interview, “if they felt that wage policies are unfair?”
In the decade before Yellen and Akerlof arrived in the Bay Area, a group of local child care teachers had begun a conversation about their rights as educators, including adequate wages. Their stories emerge in “: A Four-Decade Perspective,” published this past summer in Exchange magazine, by Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Child Care Workforce in Berkeley’s Institute for Labor Research and Education, and early childhood consultant Rory Darrah. Their brief history of the Worthy Wage Campaign is an inspiring read, and the principles as vital as ever:
- To create a unified voice for the concerns of the early care and education workforce at the national, state, and local levels
- To increase the value and respect for those who provide early care and education through improving their wages, benefits, working conditions, and training opportunities
- To promote the accessibility and affordability of high-quality early care and education options that meet the diverse needs of children and family
Whitebook and Darrah acknowledge President Obama’s heartening declaration, “This is not babysitting. This is teaching,” in the context of his call for wage parity between early educators and K-12 teachers. But we’re not done yet, they conclude:
The interdependence of quality early care and education, quality environments, and appropriate compensation for teachers can no longer be denied nor refuted. As we move into an era of increased national attention and rigorous, quantitative monitoring of quality, the voices of teachers are needed now more than ever. [italics, mine]
I couldn’t agree more. Raise ‘em.
thanks so much for sending this! what a treat. And as you know, not much has changed in 40 years.
rory
I loved being reminded of the history of the struggle for worthy wages. But I’m a glass half-full kind of person, if impatient. Social change is so hard, and policymaking so incremental. Onward!
Oh, this is so very interesting! Thank you Susan. How powerful might it be that we have someone at the top of the Federal Reserve who evidently values early childhood??
Powerful, indeed. But she also seems to value family economic security (see where she stands on the minimum wage), so we’re looking at an inter-generational approach.