Moms, Here's What All Your Pandemic Invisible Labor Is Actually Worth

I’m writing this during my new work hours, which are between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays, or 3:30 a.m. and 12 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. At the risk of inviting a legion of Twitter gents to swarm my mentions with “dads too!” comments, it’s entirely unsurprising that the pandemic is hitting working moms harder than working dads. In a recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, more women than men reported being concerned about coronavirus exposure because they couldn’t afford to stay home and miss work. Renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, it was replaced by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which may as well have been called the “Welfare Queens Reform Act.” Whereas mothers’ pensions started as a way to enable mothers to spend time caregiving without falling into desperate poverty, the welfare system that grew out of it has forgotten all about the idea that caregiving has value, that it is productive labor that benefits society. If we were to take the idea back to its roots, as a less-gendered parents’ pension, perhaps as part of a stimulus response to the pandemic, it could serve much of the same function as a universal basic income policy, providing a social safety net as the economy transitions away from some industries and toward new ones, and we emerge from an unprecedented public health catastrophe.