Irene Hunt still gets choked up when she talks about it. A few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, after being exposed to clients who were exhibiting symptoms, the home care worker in Springfield, Oregon, made the wrenching decision to separate from her seven-year-old daughter and temporarily move her child into her mother-in-law’s house.
“I showed up at her door and I didn’t come in. I just started crying, and I said, ‘Mom, I’m going to have to leave her here.’ I get emotional”—Hunt pauses, her voice wavering. “‘Mom, I have to leave her here so I can protect you guys.’”
Hunt said her agency had not provided her with personal protective gear, citing shortages, as she cared for clients whose lives depend on her. Some suffer from dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and muscular dystrophy. One lives alone, with no living relatives. “I’m the only person that comes and takes care of him,” Hunt said. “He would not get food, he would not get changed, without me.”
For the next two and a half months, with school closed and Hunt and her husband, who works at an HVAC company, reporting to their essential jobs, their daughter remained at Hunt’s mother-in-law’s. What haunted Hunt was not when she would be able to see her daughter again, but “not knowing if I would ever be able to.” At night, she prayed: “Please, Lord, don’t let me get sick,” Hunt recalled. “Please let me be around my child one more time.”
In a country that touts family values, under a president who promises greatness, the American government is failing essential working families like Hunt’s. Many people lament the “impossible” situation the pandemic has created: the maddening disconnect of economies reopening while summer camps, schools, and day cares remain closed.
Who exactly do leaders think is watching all the children?
A woman, most likely. Women are exhausted. After four months of assuming most of the burden of homeschooling by Zoom and Skype and seemingly endless additional household work, they are at a breaking point. And with many schools across the country announcing they are only opening part-time this fall, there is no end in sight. Historically, female caregivers “have absorbed these problems, subsidized it with our unpaid labor, carried on in unbelievable circumstances without complaints, often behind closed doors,” Dawn Huckelbridge, executive director of the Paid Leave for All campaign, told Vogue. “There’s this expectation that women and families will now take on not double shifts, but triple shifts of work and caregiving and distance learning.” According to a new study in Gender, Work and Organization, “mothers with young children have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers. Consequently, the gender gap in work hours has grown by 20 to 50 percent.”
But the current conversation often ignores a viable glimmer of a solution, one normally reserved for the privileged: paid leave. Since sending kids back to school full-time is clearly not an option, giving parents paid leave to care for them should be.
Paid leave, Huckelbridge points out, is not just about parents and children, but workers being able to take care of themselves and their families when they’re sick—a protection that feels more urgent than ever as more than 3 million total COVID cases have been recorded across the country. According to Paid Leave for All, when the pandemic hit the U.S., more than 33 million workers—many of them low-wage workers of color—didn’t have a single guaranteed paid sick day.
“The lack of paid leave has been a crisis in the making that felt like it was in slow motion,” Huckelbridge said. “All of a sudden, a pandemic hits, and we’re all realizing just how catastrophic it is.”
The pandemic finally spurred Congress to action: In March, it passed the Families First Act, granting eligible workers up to two weeks of emergency paid sick leave and 10 weeks of emergency paid leave for child care reasons, including children at home due to school closures. (Employers are reimbursed for the costs of emergency paid leave by tax credits.) The bipartisan bill was a momentary triumph for paid leave advocates, but it was riddled with loopholes, allowing some small businesses and health care industry and other employers to opt out, potentially excluding tens of millions of essential workers and as many as 106 million workers total, according to the Center for American Progress.
In May, the House of Representatives went on to pass the Heroes Act, a coronavirus relief bill seeking to close the loopholes, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared it would be “dead on arrival” in the Senate. In a new proposed relief package, McConnell wants to tie relief funding to schools reopening, and shield businesses from coronavirus-related lawsuits, but makes no effort to close the paid-leave loopholes.
One exemption rendered Hunt ineligible: The law only applies to companies with fewer than 500 employees. “When it was asked of us, we did what we were supposed to do, and now we’re forgotten,” Hunt said. She said she wants to cry at the hypocrisy of emotional TV commercials thanking essential workers. In real life, Hunt added, “I don’t feel thanked.”
The pandemic has magnified the existing inequities in health care, income, racial injustice, class, and gender roles—and paid leave intersects with all of them. The ability to self-quarantine for 14 days and not lose a paycheck or even your job is a privilege denied to many low-wage workers.
While working as a ramp agent at United Airlines in Denver, Kris Garcia said, he shared the break room with a coworker who was sent home with a high fever and later tested positive for COVID-19. When Garcia alerted his second employer, FedEx, where he worked as a package sorter, of his exposure to the virus, he said his manager told him to self-quarantine for two weeks, and promised Garcia he’d be paid. But Garcia said he never received the two weeks’ pay, and when he reported to work at FedEx after 14 days, Garcia says, he was terminated for abandoning his post. In a statement to Vogue, FedEx said “current or former employees with claims of this nature are encouraged to raise them through appropriate company channels.”
Like Hunt, Garcia was excluded from taking emergency paid leave under the Families First Act because FedEx employs more than 500 people. “Other countries have managed to figure out how to take care of people that are taking care of their country,” Garcia told Vogue, “and yet our country gives tax breaks to large corporations that don’t take care of their employees.” The U.S. is the only developed nation in the world without a national paid leave policy in place. “As a trans man who identifies with my Indigenous/Latinx roots, we need to do more to close the gaps,” Garcia wrote in a Father’s Day blog post for the paid leave advocacy group Family Values @ Work.
For families fortunate enough to use it, emergency paid leave is nothing short of a game changer. Before the passage of Families First, Casey Osborn-Hinman, senior campaign director at MomsRising in Seattle, and her husband, a labor union organizer, were getting up at 4 or 5 a.m. to get as much work done as they could before their kids stirred, Osborn-Hinman told Vogue, “and then we were just tagging in and out literally all day doing conference calls and meetings.” After an hour or two of uninterrupted time with the kids in the evenings, she and her husband would remote-work until midnight or 1 a.m., finishing what they didn’t have time for during the day. Still, “we were really privileged to be able to do it that way,” Osborn-Hinman said.
For the past few weeks, under the emergency paid leave afforded by Families First, Osborn-Hinman’s husband is taking two days’ leave per week from his job, while Osborn-Hinman takes the other three, allowing them to focus their days more fully on either work or caring for their children, who are home from school and day care. Osborn-Hinman admits it’s a privilege to be “focusing on our family’s quality of life when other people are literally struggling to put food on the table and to keep a roof over head, but [Families First] really did make our life more manageable and sustainable. It made us better workers and made our kids happier and healthier.”
When Irene Hunt’s mother-in-law was called back to work at Kohl’s during Phase 2 of Oregon’s reopening, her daughter moved back home and Hunt and her husband had no choice but to start paying for backup day care they hadn’t budgeted for. September, when her daughter will return to school only two days a week, presents a looming financial and logistical crisis: “The new school system is going to be horribly insane,” Hunt said. “I’m supposed to work and I’m supposed to homeschool her the other days, and I’m supposed to afford child care throughout the whole year with no raise.…” She trailed off. “Where am I supposed to come up with that?”
Paid leave is poised to be a crucial component of the delicate process of schools reopening: Without it, workers could go to work sick rather than stay home, get tested, and curb transmissions. “We’re only as safe and protected as our most vulnerable neighbors,” Huckelbridge said. As devastating as the pandemic is, it has laid bare that paid leave is “something we needed before, we certainly need now, and we’re going to need for the long haul.”