“Our Broken Childcare System Is at Its Heart a Labor Issue”

What a Grassroots Movement for Universal Childcare Can Do

Informed by more than a dozen interviews with childcare providers and workers, parent-organizers, union staff, and researchers in California, a new brief authored by Roosevelt’s Lena Bilik offers one path to universal childcare: an organized movement of childcare workers and the communities who rely on them.

The problem: Childcare is too expensive for many parents, and yet childcare providers make poverty wages. The result has been severe staffing shortages, with half of US families now stranded in childcare deserts.

What Californians are doing about it: Organizers have taken creative approaches to raise consciousness, build power, and advocate for policy changes, including

• educational campaigns focused on revenue-raising and myth-busting (“the state telling providers that ‘we can’t afford it’ is not a true or good enough excuse”);
• union-led Solidarity Academies that provide skills training and political education for both childcare workers and their communities; and
• sectoral bargaining led by California Childcare Providers United to win benefits for all home-based providers, not just members of CCPU.

To address the childcare market failure more broadly, Roosevelt experts have written extensively about the need for public funding that supports a universal childcare system, and raises wages for workers—a majority of whom are low-income women, and disproportionately women of color. The collective power of these very workers is crucial in the fight for public childcare.

“California is just one example of a growing worker power movement to mobilize childcare providers to fight for what they need and deserve as a sector,” Bilik writes, “which can in turn create the environment of care that families also need and deserve.”

Read the brief: The Collective Power of Childcare Workers and Their Communities: A Case Study of California

What the Supreme Court’s Decision Against Trump’s Tariffs Means Going Forward

The Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s tariffs today, and as Roosevelt’s Todd N. Tucker has previously explained, there were few good outcomes expected.

“While many of those Americans negatively affected by the tariffs will cheer at having won this battle, the cost is losing the war against an ever more empowered right-wing court,” Tucker said today. “Have no doubt: This precedent will be weaponized against future administrations that try to use government to improve people’s lives.”

A New Residency to Develop Economic Leaders

TheRoosevelt Institute is launching the Good Life Residents Program to help scholars and practitioners generate big ideas to address today’s economic crises. “At a time when too many working people struggle to afford the things that make life good,” says Chief Strategy Officer Allison Zelman, “our policy debates can’t afford to stand still.”

The first cohort will kick off by reimagining Social Security and the Fed. How do we reassert Social Security as a vital institution, and not only preserve but improve and expand on it? How do we ensure a democratically accountable Fed system that upholds both sides of its dual mandate?

Applications are due March 4.

What We’re Talking About

What We’re Reading

• Growing old should be a gift, not a burden: Many Americans become informal caregivers to our elders when the time comes, which can lead to stress or force workers out of the labor market. In a Q&A with Roosevelt’s Ijeoma Ogbonna, Roosevelt Fellow Regina Seo discusses her research into policies that can support the well-being of caregivers, care recipients, and the economy as a whole.  
• Workers, so far, are losing out in the AI age: Corporate profits from the AI boom are vastly outpacing worker wage growth, illustrating how the economy’s “rewards are going disproportionately toward capital instead of labor,” the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip wrote earlier this month. “The biggest winners of all? Shareholders.”
• Populist rhetoric isn’t reform: The State of the Union is just days away, and Trump is likely to use the stage to tout economic wins. But the White House’s policy proposals fall short—and Roosevelt’s breakdown shows why.