Maine’s critical child care industry is in crisis. Parents need and want to go to work, but can’t do so without safe and reliable child care for their children. Currently, there is not enough child care to support our working parents.
The problem with our child care shortage is twofold: we need more programs, and we need more staff in these programs. Compounding this problem is that no one organization or sector can solve the child care crisis alone. It takes businesses, nonprofits, government and philanthropy partnering in innovative ways to make sure we can solve this crisis.
That is why the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce and United Way of Southern Maine have partnered with several area employers to build new child care programs. We are starting by planning to retrofit buildings in Freeport, South Portland and Biddeford to create new child care centers. That takes care of one side of the equation: appropriate space. The other side of the equation is staff, and staffing challenges are more daunting given the low wages paid to child care educators in Maine.
The second problem can only be addressed with support from the state. This is why the proposed biennial budget is so concerning. The proposed budget includes a $15 million annual cut to child care educators’ wages. This is a cut to some of Maine’s hardest working, most essential employees who remain in the bottom 3% of wage earners.
Currently, child care educators earn an average of $16.40 per hour, or approximately $34,000 annually. Cutting the monthly stipend program by half, as the budget proposes, would reduce wages to $15.15 per hour ($31,500 annually). This proposal will make hiring and retaining our critical child care workforce next to impossible.
United Way’s ALICE data shows that educators with such a low household income struggle — paycheck to paycheck — to make ends meet. If educators cannot meet their own basic household budget, they cannot stay in this critical workforce.
As leaders of two organizations looking to have Maine be a place where people can truly afford to live, work and retire here, we worry that any proposed cut to child care educators’ wages will cause this vital industry to implode. Based on surveys of some of the employers we are partnering with, the lack of high-quality, affordable child care has been one of the top two barriers to workforce development since the pandemic, alongside housing.
Maine’s child care workforce truly is the workforce behind the workforce, and this workforce needs and deserves continued critical state support, not cuts.
Data supporting a state investment was made painfully clear in a recent ReadyNation report on the economic impact of Maine’s child care crisis. The data is sobering.
Pre-pandemic, ReadyNation found that the lack of affordable infant and toddler child care in America was costing the national economy $57 billion annually. In just four years, post-COVID, the economic impact of the child care crisis has more than doubled, to $122 billion in lost earnings, productivity and revenue every year. In Maine, the lack of child care — for just infants and toddlers — costs Maine’s economy an estimated $403 million per year, more than double the 2019 estimate of $180 million per year.
These losses are calculated based on parent surveys reporting that the infant-toddler child care crisis had caused them to be fired, or to have pay or hours reduced, nearly three times more often than in 2019. The lack of child care caused parents to be demoted or transferred to a less desirable job, or change from full-time to part-time work, more than twice as often. Rates of parents reporting quitting a job due to child care problems also doubled.
We know that if parents do not have child care, they cannot go to work. Employers need a reliable workforce and that depends on reliable child care.
It’s a cycle in a broken system that will not be resolved on its own without continued and strengthened, not reduced, state support. It’s why so many of us are partnering together to play our role; we need the state to as well.
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