this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
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What's funny in a sad-not-haha way, is that labor for caretaking of small human beings is the enormous untenable driving cost here.
Parents can't afford the rates, daycares can't afford living wages for the caretakers. This is an endeavor, like many, that the Hand of the Market(TM) is OBVIOUSLY unsuitable for solving.
The "funny" part: Parents would gladly do this job for free as they have for centuries and millennia. This problem was already solved, and wouldn't be an issue if every member of the household wasn't forced into full-time 40+ hour work plus hunting for side-hustles, and being taken away from their loved ones for most of their waking friggin lives, just to survive.
How many generations deep are we now? Where so many kids spend so long in daycare from infancy that they never even get to form a decent bond with their own parents? How healthy is that, for anybody, much less larger society?
"Parenting as a Service" is peak capitalistic hellscape...
Edit: spelling
I agree with you - if you need to pay someone a full time wage to go out and earn a full time wage, the sum will be nearly zero. The same issue applies for long term care facilities where a team of multiple specialized providers is needed to care for someone around the clock. The assumption that care should be cheap implies that care work is less valuable than whatever the worker themself does.
Much like mail delivery, daycare and elder care would be better as publicly funded services. They can’t necessarily turn a profit, but still need to exist for the betterment of society
My wife is starting her own home daycare Monday for many of the reasons you listed. Almost a decade at a YMCA run Montessori, ~18/hr.
And the poor kids! The caregivers are all burnt out by terrible management and shit pay, have no motivation to provide anything beyond the necessities, and God bless them, at least a few spend their own money on supplies to at least try and enrich the time the kids spend there.
I'm really proud of her, taking a huge step into somewhat unknown water. I know the kids she cares for are going to get so much more value from her, here in her space, on her terms, than they ever would have at the center.
That sounds daunting but also incredibly noble of her. Prayers and well wishes to both you and your wife, especially in the early days of this endeavor!
I love hearing about when someone sees a need they can fill in their community and they're passionate about solving it. That's so awesome. :)
good luck. the regulatory hurdles are not fun, but regulations are written in blood. they don't go to the trouble of setting regs unless someone had been seriously harmed.
If you want to keep her employees (if she has any) happy, don't push the limits of the caregiver:child ratios. I'm not sure what [the amount of money you want to have saved up so your business doesn't fail] in early childhood education is, but a good rule of thumb is start with 2 years worth of expenses saved as most businesses take at least that long to break even. Restaurants, 5 years.
[BOILERPLATE CYA WARNING]
i did accounting for 25 years and virtually all of my clients were small businesses and their owners, so while this is arguably professional advice, it is not tailored to your specific situation. it is general advice and not intended for you to rely on. if you want advice tailored to you and your situation that is intended for you to rely on, hire an accounting consultant.well we have that situation in germany right now where supposedly daycare is good because it allows women to work more hours (full time instead of half time)
it's ... let me tell you, it's a shitshow. i have come to understand that the internet is largely a propaganda apparatus. they install the thought in you that a certain way of seeing things is "normal", because everybody sees it that way. in other words, the other bots or paid influencers (idk which one) that the algorithm then pushes sothat everybody sees it.
you got 1 crazy person saying things like "actually, we should all work more, i like it, it's fun" and you know what, they can say that. anyways, that's 1 person in 1000. then the algorithm pushes it on everybody's front page sothat now everybody thinks "ah, that's a normal thing to think". and since most people follow group-think, that's now society's opinion.
internet exists to cause a shift in public opinion by astroturfing. the illusion that the thought comes from within society organically.
WHO guidelines say children should stay with mother until 3 to bond and go to childcare from 3 to get social skills. But germany only pays up for like 1 yr and even that only limited. Grandparents have to work until they are barely fit enough to help too.
Makes you wonder, with all those technical advances we have, why we work more and more having worse living conditions down the drain.
Hmm so I both agree and disagree with you here. Hustle culture arises from societal things here such as hyperindividualism, Puritan work ethic and toxic masculinity that grifters package and push (where I agree with you). But it's metastasizing from us to you all so it seems alien.
The irony is that this causes birth rates to plummet, which eliminates the future workforce for the very companies forcing childcare to be untenable. One of the major contradictions of capitalism is that it does not reproduce its own labor force. I guess the resolution is to replace human workers with AI.
On global level population is still growing. With globalization, companies couldnt care less if a worker is from US or Africa. ChatGPT's training was supervised by kenia workers for laughable wages.
For sure, but the growth rate is rapidly decreasing in the developing world too. If that continues eventually there will be nobody left to run the machines.
Society's hyper-competitiveness to "get an edge" is ultimately self-cannibalizing.
This is something that drives me so mad, and it's exactly why corporations need to be strictly regulated on a global scale.
If people are granted any voluntary dignity, someone out there is always willing to "undercut" their fellow workers to get an "edge" on the market or whatever and prove what a sweaty exploitable tryhard they can be, then it races to the bottom for all.
If a company wants to pay its workers a living wage, their competition will undercut them by stepping on their employees' necks for an "advantage in the market."
You're right, it's simply not a system that solves for human well-being, it solves solely for hoarding and growing large numbers of imaginary value.
no we just need to import workers from outside the environment.
JFC, I could see someone unironically marketing this.
bullshit
these are some strong opinions right there without much substance
i called my childcare guardians "comrade teacher" and i gladly pay half of my salary for a childcare in the "capitalist dream" now. neither has anything to do with the real reasons why we have childcare nor why it is expensive somewhere or free somewhere else.
childcare enables parents to do more with their life than just have kids and as such is good both for parents and for the society in general. it also enables children to access early childhood education and community that their parents wouldn't be able to provide otherwise so - if done right - is also great for the kids.
but of course, as with everything with life, things can be messed up by the people. parents or teachers can screw up in many different ways or even the whole childcare might be organised for an entirely wrong reason... that doesn't mean childcare is a bad idea in general.
Woah there, friend. Aren't we being a little bit aggro here? I'm happy to hear your perspective.
I never meant to come off that childcare is bad as a concept! That was never the point.
What I am decrying is the requirement of families being coerced to put their children into a very expensive facility, because if everyone else in the house isn't working a 5x40+ fulltime job, they can't afford a reasonable quality of living. THAT is where it's broken.
Childcare as an option is fantastic for all the reasons you mentioned. Childcare as "the market raises your children with underpaid and exhausted, overhelmed wageslaves unless you're insanely privileged" is not cool.
I'm happy you've had a good experience though, and hope we can reach a solution where it's done right for more folks.
well if childcare as an option is fantastic and all you are angry about is the childcare as an unaffordable necessity then we are totally in agreement...
the way you wrote your original comment didn't entirely hit me that way though. it definitely gave me more of an impression that you consider childcare as bad (see the quote) and your solution to people struggling is traditional family values and housewives.
Sorry, no I don't believe I conveyed myself in that way, updoots seem to agree.
I do think we're in alignment here, but also I understand nuance is often lost over Internet posts so let me clarify my position. "Family values and housewives" as you put it being a great example:
Women having the opportunity to leave the home of their own volition and be in a career the same as a man? Awesome. Progress.
Women AND men alike, in a family unit, forced simultaneously into the career-style workforce or multiple garbage jobs because the family goes bust and destitute otherwise? Bullshit.
Programs for kids to safely socialize and learn as a community? Fantastic!
Overwhelmed daycares staffed by burned out underpaid care workers, costing half of everyone's salary, because otherwise the only alternative is literally child abandonment, thanks to everybody needing to leave the home and devote a majority of their time to wage labor? Capitalistic nightmare.
That's basically a systemic form of indentured servitude to pay ransom for one's own children. It isn't right.
Parents should be free to choose parenting their children over creating shareholder value without starving. Parenting is already a full time job, and outsourcing it entirely to someone else's employees every "business day" sounds like a great way to wreck a society's future adults.
Especially in the U.S when maternity leave is laughably short for many, and paternity leave is a fanciful myth from faraway lands, and those early years spent with one's family are CRITICAL for a child's early development.
So when I satirically said "parenting as a service" (mocking 'software as a service' / rent-seeking behavior), I wasn't referring to "Watch our kids and enrich them a little occasionally."
I literally meant "A paid service has to raise our children because we aren't rich enough to spend much time with them besides breakfast and bedtime."
That sounds pretty horrible to me.
WAIT HOLD ON I GOTTA SHOW THIS TO MY WIFE (teaches kinder) she's gonna love you