Meet a childcare worker who makes $15 an hour and lives with 4 roommates to be able to afford doing the job she loves
FatCamera/Getty Images
- Marie is a childcare worker in Georgia, where she makes $15 an hour to teach 3-year-olds.
- She lives with four roommates and lived with family until recently because of high housing costs.
- She said that many childcare workers don't make enough to live on, leading to staffing shortages.
Marie wants people to know that her job isn't just sitting around and playing with kids all day.
A childcare worker, Marie works with 3-year-olds at a Montessori school in Georgia. Although she loves her work, her days are intense.
"Every kid has different needs, and you have to be going through documenting what progress they've made in learning, any struggles they have in learning," she said. She's even dealing with pull-ups and diapers, as fewer kids have been potty-trained in the wake of COVID — something unusual among 3-year-olds.
Staff shortages are also an issue.
"You always have to be in the room with them. You can never leave them alone," she said. "If you have to go to the bathroom, and I'm by myself, I basically am holding it most of the day in my room."
For all of that work, Marie — whose last name is known to Insider, but withheld over privacy and professional concerns — said she makes just $15 an hour, which aligns with job postings for her school. That's below the national average of $17.53 an hour, and right around the median hourly wage of $14.52, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Marie's home state of Georgia, a living wage is $17.72 for a single adult without children, or $13.66 per adult for two working adults without children, according to MIT's living wage calculator. Marie's $15 wage is better than what she was earning pre-COVID, but "it's still really not enough."
"With the price of housing, there's no way I could live purely by myself. I was living with family actually, until recently, and the only reason I was really able to move out is because my boyfriend and another couple we know and another friend we know all decided to rent a house together," she said. "There's five of us in one house that we're renting, not even owning."
Low pay for childcare workers isn't a new phenomenon: In 2003, average weekly earnings at privately owned childcare establishments came in at $302, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. That's $500.02 a week in 2023-inflation adjusted dollars. Since then, wages have slowly increased, with a dip in 2008 in the wake of the Great Recession. In 2021, childcare workers made an average of $533 a week.
As with many other sectors of the economy, the pandemic brought childcare's problems to the forefront. Many childcare workers found themselves facing hard conditions and low pay — and, rather than accept those, left the profession entirely. That's led to labor shortages, which in turn has led to less-available childcare and fewer parents able to work.
Another sacrifice Marie has made in the short-staffed field is rarely taking time off.
"There's the feeling of, 'Oh, well, if I take time off someone else is gonna have to cover for me. I don't know what's gonna happen while I'm gone,'" she said. "Basically, I feel like I'm burdening someone else with my work."
Some childcare workers love the field so much that they 'just make it work'
Marie thinks there are a few reasons for the labor shortages in the field, but low pay is the big one.
"It's not a livable salary," she said. "Again, the people at my job are either women who have wealthy husbands so they're doing it more just because they enjoy it, or people who just love it so much that they just make it work somehow."
One former coworker, a single mom, was on food stamps, she said. A study from the Stanford Center on Early Childhood found that from March 2021 to December 2022, one-in-four childcare providers reported they were having difficulty affording housing. Marie, who lives in a house with four roommates, would like to someday be able to have a space of her own.
And as schools try to fill as many spots as possible in an effort to stay afloat, those larger classrooms can weigh on teachers. Demanding parents, especially those who view teachers as glorified babysitters, can also be a strain, Marie said.
But at the end of the day, Marie loves her job. For her, it's all about the kids.
"I tried doing office work as like a receptionist," she said. "Totally hated it. Would much rather be getting messy with paints and glue and all of that fun stuff than sitting in an office."
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/iTecOsK
No comments