The Care Economy

Floor Speech

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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

The Democratic Caucus--and I see that now we have all three of the leaders of that caucus that I am so proud to be a member of.

Madam Speaker, my daughter is a childcare worker. She works in a childcare center, and I am so proud of her and just the effort and the creativity and just the energy that she puts into this very low-paid job. If it weren't for someone else earning money in the household, she could not really afford to live on that pay.

I quote from a scholar who said, ``most developed countries in this world have some kind of a robust social safety net. The United States has women.'' And when it comes to taking care of those in need, either as workers or as family members, it is mostly women.

I want to tell you that in the eighties, I was director--and proudly so--of the Illinois State Council of Senior Citizens. And as part of that, I was a cochair of the Long-Term Care Coalition that we had in Illinois.

At that time, there was no long-term healthcare policy in the United States of America. And guess what? There is no long-term care policy in the United States of America right now. Families are left to figure it out.

What are we going to do? I am getting older. I don't have family.

What am I going to do to take care of myself? I am getting older and my family is the only one available to take care of me.

I have to move in with my children, or they have to move in with me to take care of me because there is no other choice.

Or you end up--I don't know--in some kind of an institution where people, again, are poorly paid--often women of color, often low-income women. In fact, for home care, the average worker does make about $12 an hour, with no benefits. And if you have to travel from one place to another, there is no payment for that kind of transportation or getting there. It is not really doable. And so we have made pretty much no progress until now. And then the President of the United States, Joe Biden, said we are going to have Medicare, home- and community-based services in this country.

Now, he announced a very big amount of money to go for that. I don't know if that is going to be able to be paid for fully right now in the Build Back Better plan, but we are going to make a start. We are going to say yes. It is not just that we are going to leave families, women at home, not being able to go back to the workplace themselves. We are going to have a home care policy. And that is where people want to be, in their homes, in the United States of America.

I believe that we will see billions and billions of dollars that are going to be able to go to long-term care. And we are going to pay attention to these workers. It is not right. It is not possible to depend on workers who, themselves, live in poverty; don't have someone to care for them when they get older; often can't even afford to get-- we talk about paid sick leave--have no health insurance, have no backup, if they get sick.

This is absolutely not working in this country. If we are going to build back better, we have to build back better for women. We have to build back better for women toward the end of life, as we age. We have to take care of women and children in this country.

It is really embarrassing, in a way, when we look at the rest of the world, how far behind the richest country in the world is in taking care of our families, the most in need in our country. But we are finally at a tipping and turning point right now. We have an administration, we have leaders in the House and the Senate who are now saying those days are gone.

We are now going to be a country that, as the President says, is built from the bottom up and the middle out. We are going to take care of workers. We are going to take care of families, and we are going to take care of women and children. I am just so proud to be part of a caucus that is determined to make this a reality, to transform the United States of America into a place that is safe and healthy and has opportunity for all of us.

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