Movement of Family Caregivers say NO to Trump/Vance Proposal for Families
As women who have campaigned for financial recognition for family caregivers for over 50 years, we are outraged, but not surprised, at the Trump/Vance proposal to pay “married citizen couples” to look after their children full time while further impoverishing families headed by single mothers.
It is increasingly acknowledged that family caregivers, starting with mothers, have earned the right to direct cash support for our work. After all, we produce and reproduce every human being on this planet! The latest estimates value caring and domestic work at $1.5 trillion in the US, $11 trillion worldwide. Although society could not function without this work, it is not counted, valued or paid—the major reason why women are the poorest sex and why the most impoverished family caregivers in the US, single mothers receiving welfare, are not praised for coping in difficult circumstances, but rather are attacked as lazy scroungers.
The Trump/Vance so-named “pro-family proposal” does not support all families or women within the family. It is sexist and racist, robbing the poorest women. Single mothers (mainly of color and/or immigrant) in waged work would lose the childcare vouchers they depend on to be able to get a job and support their children, while “married citizen couples” would get up to $9000 a year per child if one works full-time and one stays home to care for a child. It is not clear who the money would be paid to: the fulltime caregiver (usually the mother) or the wage earner (most likely to be the man)?
The proposal, which meets one of the goals of the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, would reinforce men’s control over women and children. It would drive women into marriage and financial dependency on men, encourage women to stay in marriages where they may be vulnerable to emotional and or physical violence, punish mothers who become single as a result of fleeing a violent man, and exclude immigrant families and non-traditional families, widows, grandmothers/grandparents and others providing kinship care for children. Trump claims it can be implemented without Congressional approval as part of his anti DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) agenda.
The money for this proposal would come from the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF)—an approximately $12 billion federal-state program that provides childcare vouchers for 1.3 million eligible children of low-income parents who work outside the home. Of those now receiving CCDF, 80% are single mothers, disproportionately women of color.
Rather than increasing CCDF funding or setting up separate funding for the Trump/Vance proposal, current CCDF funding would have to cover greater numbers of eligible parents. This set up would basically cause single mothers and married couples to be in competition for the same pot of CCDF funds. According to the New York Times and Senator Patty Murray (D WA) this could lead to the closure of 225,000 childcare centers. All this at a time when families are already having difficulty finding and affording quality childcare.
The Wages for Housework Campaign (WFHC), which coordinates the Global Women’s Strike and its affiliated autonomous organizations of women of color, queer women, disabled women, single mothers and sex workers, has for decades been demanding a guaranteed care income (GCI) for all those, of whatever gender but beginning with mothers, who do the work of raising children, caring for elders or those of us who are ill or have a disability, and defending our communities, the land and the environment. This financial recognition would provide us with the ability to choose what is best for us and our families, and whether or when we take a job outside the home.
Raising the status of family caregivers would help raise the wages of those who do this work outside the home, usually for low pay. This includes homecare, childcare and domestic workers, disproportionately women of color and immigrant women, who instead of being thanked for their hard work, their taxes and their contribution to the economy are being persecuted by ICE/immigration authorities.
Instead of being a source of power for women, caregiving has led to impoverishment, financial dependence, domestic violence and discrimination. According to the UN, “Conventional economic frameworks systematically undervalue care and support work, mislabeling it as “unproductive”. Women perform 76.2% of unpaid care work globally, 3.2 times more than men, leading to profound gender inequalities.” We are penalized under social security which calls the years spent raising children our zero years. And our children are under constant threat of being taken from us by child welfare agencies that conflate poverty with neglect, especially if we are Black or Brown.
It is tragic that many on the so called “left” and “progressives,” including mainstream feminists and academics, have been so dismissive of the rights of and resources for full time family caregivers and the (mostly) women who do caregiving, that right-wing politicians like Trump and Vance can claim to speak for stay-at-home mothers.
But we will not allow women to be pitted against each other by a white male supremacist agenda. We will continue to build on what we have won and are winning towards a society that invests in caring not killing, and rewards all carers regardless of race or gender.
We take inspiration from Johnnie Tillmon, a leader of the welfare rights movement in the US, who said, “If I were president, I’d just issue a proclamation that ‘women’s’ work is real work. In other words, I’d start paying women a living wage for doing the work we are already doing—child-raising and housekeeping.”
And from suffragette Crystal Eastman who called for mothers to be compensated. And Eleanor Rathbone, the independent feminist Member of Parliament who won family allowances for mothers in the UK in 1945. She said “. . . nothing can justify the subordination of one group of producers—the mothers—to the rest, and their deprivation of a share of their own in the wealth of a community which depends on them for its very existence.”
In 1977, at the first congressionally mandated National Conference on Women, Black Women for Wages for Housework and the WFHC, together with the leadership of the National Welfare Rights Organization, brought together Black single mothers from the North and conservative white mothers from the South to win a resolution that welfare should be called “a wage not charity.” Both sides of the aisle agreed with our message that “Every Mother is a Working Mother.”
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the UN Decade for Women responded to the international movement we coordinated by agreeing that unwaged work in the home, on the land and in the community should be valued in national accounts. This led, among other things, to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) launching the American Time Use Survey, which found that parents, particularly mothers of young children, spent substantial amounts of time each day on unpaid caregiving and household work. These contributions are still not reflected in the US Gross Domestic Product.
Respondents to our 2023 international survey, “What Mothers and Other Caregivers Want,” which included men and trans women, overwhelmingly agreed that “caregiving is a contribution to society that should be paid, for example, with a care income and that they would be happier and/or a better caregiver if they received recognition and an income for their caregiving work.”
Most recently the Center for the Study of Social Policy reported on the findings of a national survey of mothers and other primary caregivers, which concluded: “To support the care of young children, policymakers should create a program of direct cash for caregivers to pay parents . . .”
There have been numerous guaranteed income pilots directed at caregivers. A San Francisco pilot, initiated by In Defense of Prostitute Women’s Safety Project in partnership with the Global Women’s Strike and Women of Color/GWS, was the first to offer a guaranteed care income. It provided $2000 a month for a year to 10 low-income single mothers vulnerable to criminalization and/or having their children removed by the child welfare system. The results showed that families thrive when their caregiving contribution is acknowledged, and they have enough money to meet their basic needs.
Uncontested evidence was provided by the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) during the Covid pandemic. The CTC was increased, made fully refundable, paid monthly and available to all parents. The result: nearly half of children were lifted out of poverty, and there was no decrease in paid employment. Mothers used the money to put food on the table, pay for basic necessities and for children’s activities they had not been able to previously afford. The expanded CTC was popular across political divides but was blocked by Senate Republicans.
If the Trump administration and Congress really want to increase the financial wellbeing of mothers and children, they should pass the American Family Act introduced in the House by Representative DeLauro (D-CT-3), which has all the components of the expanded Child Tax Credit, restore and increase funding for SNAP and Medicaid and not mandate work to receive benefits. They should pass Representative Gwen Moore’s (D-WI-4) Worker Relief and Credit Reform Act, which counts caregiving as work for the purposes of receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit. And they should establish a care income that adequately reflects the economic value of the work of all mothers and other family caregivers, rather than use public policy to push a patriarchal agenda that glorifies “traditional families” by punishing single mothers.
Internationally, a number of states in India pay unconditional cash transfers to women in recognition of their unwaged work in the home and in Peru a bill in Parliament, supported by several political parties, calls for an economic benefit for those doing unpaid care work.
A universal care income is increasingly being embraced around the world as more and more people question how we can survive if governments, starting with the US, continue to invest in oil and other polluting energies, war and genocide regardless of their impact on people and the planet.
Earlier this year, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights launched the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth. It includes our proposal for a Universal Care Income to address “the structural undervaluation of care work — both paid and unpaid — that sustains people, communities and ecosystems” and “the historical ‘care debt’ borne by women.” That would support families, all families!
Statement issued by Care Income Now!, Global Women’s Strike and Women of Color/Global Women’s Strike
Contact: careincomenow@globalwomenstrike.net
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