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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Daycare is a crazy one. Insanely expensive, yet the workers are damn near indentured servants.
It’s almost like somebody pays the workers much less than the revenues and pockets the difference
You would think, but for the most part daycare is a very low profit industry. The problem I think is that all the costs tend to scale with size. So having a lot more clients just means a lot higher costs.
There are exceptions of course, but all of those that I've seen also have some other luxury additions to basic care.
I can't see it as being a high expenditure business. Majority of spending should be towards rent/mortgage and repair and maintenance. It's not like there is a lot of consumables or anything. All that money has to go somewhere.
Cleaning supplies alone are a huge consumable. Arts & crafts materials. Toys are basically consumables because kids play rough. Same for books. Some daycares include breakfast, lunch, and snack. First aid supplies, kids hurt themselves all the time.
But yeah, definitely also lots of diverting profits up to the CEO 😓
I appreciate your realistic assessment here.
When we consider all that reasonably goes into running such a service, we can rationally figure out how much is being diverted to the wrong pockets and make it better.
i assume its for some type of insurance but I also don't run a day care.
It's honestly a major contributor to the labor shortage. For anyone with a decent job, it's significantly cheaper for the spouse to just stay home until the kids are old enough to take care of themselves.
Don't let the media force you to twist your words-- it is not a labor shortage, but a wage and cost of living crisis.
"Nobody wants to work anymore" == "I pay so shitty wages that no one can even afford to come work for me."
I've run into dozens of people who are complaining about how they have applied to literally everything and never heard back or get rejected for things like gas station cashier and yet those places always put up the help wanted signs. Shortage seems like a fabrication when these places hire nobody and keep the ad up
When I.T and nurses are complaining that they keep getting ghosted and can't find work? That feels like a major economic failure signal to me. It's freaking mad.
they keep the ad up sothat when roxy and joe walk in in the morning, the employer can tell them "uhm, unfortunately we can't find any other hire, so you 2 people will have to do the work of 3", effectively cheaping out of paying another person's wages.
from Now and After, by Alexander Berkman, Chapter 5: Unemployment. Available to read for free here.
A perfectly apt analysis. Thank you for the link. Anarchist Library has some good gems in there!
it's not a crisis. companies have to pay more if they want to find employees. that's higher wages.
that is if there was an actual labor shortage. sadly, there is not.
I read an interview, probably from NPR, but I can't find it at the moment. The upshot was that caring for infants is insanely expensive, since they need one-on-one care pretty much continuously.
But parents can't afford that cost, so, essentially, the price they charge for infant care is a loss-leader, and parents of older children (who need less supervision and thus more favorable staffing ratios) subsidize the cost of caring for infants. Daycare operators are barely keeping afloat.
Edit: Ah, here it is: Baby's first market failure
They may require 1-on-1 interaction, but generally the ratio for 0-2's is around 1:4.
And many childcare companies are owned by huge multi-billion dollar investment firms because they are cash generators.
Are they required to provide for the more costly babies?
My wife and I had to pay $1600 a month for daycare as things opened up after the pandemic. The teachers there would have made more working at the Burger King across the street.
I've served on the board of non-profit daycares and I [vaguely] know at least one person who actually owns a for profit daycare.
Only a complete idiot would think they were going to make any money on a daycare. The overhead is nuts -- even when paying really shitty compensation -- and the competition is relentless.
What kind of things does the overhead go to?
Cheesy poofs
Run by private equity?
The responses:
🤔
Most are, the investors need to make their money too! /s
It's a weird one because it's a huge expense but it's also completely concentrated to a subset of the population for a subset of their life. I think it should have a public option. 2 toddlers, not infants, could cost us 50k/year