Recommendation: Chris Hayes Podcast (MSNBC) with Ai-jen Poo Executive Director of Caring Across Generations in the US.
and President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. (September 2023)
Dispelling the myth that Carers are Superhuman. CAPE: Care, be Aware, Prepare & Engage.
‘Essentially, we've added a whole entire generation onto our lifespan in this country without changing anything about our policy or our culture to support the quality of life and care and the needs of a larger population; an additional generation onto our lifespan.’ Ai-jen Poo
Everyone is having a caregiving discussion.
Are you trying to ‘muddle through’, as we say in the UK?
Can we shift the narrative? Bring the discussion from the kitchen table and behind closed doors into the collective community to shape broader policy.
Can we share our ‘real’ everyday experiences and openly discuss them?
Can you ask a friend or loved one about their wishes before they become more frail and how, together with others, you can prepare for their care needs?
Together, can we raise awareness, expose the burning platform, and support caregivers who are struggling to care for their loved ones?
These are only some of the questions I regularly hear from caregivers in the UK and elsewhere. The topic and issues are universal. Whilst the healthcare and social care/welfare states differ, many common themes exist.
A while ago, I was curious to understand more about the situation in the US, and in particular, Ai-jen Poo’s work as part of the ‘Caring across generations’ organisation. (You may have seen the articles posted on LinkedIn or other social media sites).
I found this podcast. The facts, figures and experiences she shares highlight the collective need, which I believe is globally mirrored.
Having uncomfortable, difficult BRAVE discussions in our families and communities is essential to shifting the narrative. Everyone is struggling to care for loved ones everywhere, including those who provide the care.
The Chris Hayes Podcast 'Why Is This Happening' (MSNBC September 2023, 52 mins.).
Here are some of the comments Ai-jen Poo made, that I have transcribed for myself.
[Disclaimer: I am not affiliated to any charity, non-profit, coalition or political group. This is a personally transcribed independent commentary. This needs to be stated as there are strict regulations around actions and statements by those organisations. In the UK there are regulations around the ‘Charity’ status]
The introduction to the podcast, taken from the MSNBC Website:
'Given the Labour Day holiday, we're republishing one of our favourite episodes. From the original description: Every day in the United States, 10,000 people turn 65, according to the UN Population Division. We are about to have the largest older population ever. At the same time, nearly 4 million babies are born every year, leaving many Americans juggling caring for young children and ageing parents. Caregiving is often cast as non-productive labour, despite the incredible mental, emotional, and physical toll it can take. It’s increasingly clear that more resources are urgently needed to support caregivers. How can we rethink our social and economic policies to ensure that more people can age with dignity? Ai-jen Poo is President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Executive Director of Caring Across Generations. She is also the author of the 2015 book “The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.” She joins WITHpod to discuss her personal experiences that led her to be an activist, the need for more infrastructure to support caring for ageing populations, the care economy and more.'
These are the main points I transcribed for my own reference.
I’ve kept them in the sequence of the discussion, to preserve the context. (I would recommend listening to the podcast and read through the points at the same time.)
Essentially, we've added a whole entire generation onto our lifespan in this country without changing anything about our policy or our culture to support the quality of life and care and the needs of a larger population; an additional generation onto our lifespan.
At the same time, millennials are having children. So, every year, 4 million babies are born, so every year, 4 million people turn 65 years of age and live longer than ever before.
And who do we have in the middle? (working population) It’s us - managing care when there is less of it 'panini', some people call us the 'Sandwich population', but I think that's too nice...' pressed down between on a hot grill, under pressure.
We have 70% of kids under the age of 12 in the US growing up in households where all the adults in the household have to work outside of the home.
So, at a time when we need more care than ever before we have less of it available to us and that's where the idea of us needing a really strong care workforce is so essential
And it's not to displace the incredible role our grandparents, family ...will play in care
More that it's an 'all on hands on deck' situation in the 21st century America.
Actually, we need all of that care plus ...everybody - to be a part of how we care for our families.
Care definition: childcare (nurturing support), ageing care for people who need more assistance as they become more frail and have more disability to enable them to live full lives and policies paid family medical leave. It's about taking time to care for the people we love when we need to.
This work is so essential that it goes beyond the definition of essential ....because it’s so emotional and fraught...it’s part of the human experience.
The root issue is that the contributions of women, especially to the economy, have been undervalued, less than men, so work associated with women and associated with a gender role associated with the role that women play in society is valued less, ...care work is associated with enslaved black women.
The cultural devaluing of this work is happening still to this day. The profession of care work is not called a profession. It's called 'Help', and yet millions of women are doing this work every day as their profession.
Form of work that is not regulated by the state. The Care economy is the Wild West in many ways. Even for employers who want to do the right thing, it’s oftentimes hard to figure out what that is, and it's not like any other sector where you can form a union; there is no collective.
Basically, you have families who need care and are struggling in their own right and what it creates is a dynamic where for the women who are disproportionately women of colour, who do this work as their profession it’s some of the most undervalued and insecure work in our entire economy and it’s the whole dynamic that is one of the biggest drivers of inequality that no one ever talks about.
Yet these care jobs are jobs that are consistently growing faster because of the huge demand. Huge demand and a workforce that can't be outsourced and can't be automated.
Economists are predicting that in the next 10-15 years care jobs could be the largest job category in the entire US economy. Meanwhile, the medium wage for a home care worker in the United States is $21'700 per year
But the opportunity here is huge because what an incredible leverage point this could be - to make these jobs good jobs with living wages and benefits and real economic opportunity you're talking about making a triple dignity effect - if you made these jobs dignified jobs that would not only benefit the workers and their families and that's going to be a growing number of people but it also benefits....the recipients of the care ... it benefits you and me who are the working parents and family caregivers, those people who need to go to work every day.
Timestamp at 29:30 minutes: The problem is that we've been taught that care is an individual responsibility and if you can't figure it out it is your fault When actually this is a collective social need we have as a society that we should all be collectively investing in like public infrastructure This is why I'm obsessed by calling CARE infrastructure'. It is the conversation we need to be having.
What is our responsibility to working families? She quotes Senator Casey: 'Some people need a bridge or a tunnel to get to work, other people need child care, and other people need home care'.
When you leave it up to the individual it simply doesn't work. You are essentially leaving it up to the market and the market cannot solve this collective social challenge we have, we need to do it together.
(Chris Hayes voice) The answer is that the Government subsidise it that's how you make those 2 things match between the price that I pay for care and the wage the care worker gets there's going to be a government subsidy - the math so that I can afford the care and the care worker can get a good wage
Because we live in a country where 60% of the workforce earns less than $50k per year if the average cost of childcare is more than $10k per year and the average cost of a room in nursing homes is $90k per year, literally the numbers do not work...and it is not our fault...we live in an environment where literally people have been paying for care in incredibly costly inefficient ineffective ways. Having a role for government here, including a subsidy, is the way that we actually create efficiencies in our shared need to care for the people that we love.
There is a diminishing purchasing power of wages.
People who we are relying on to take care of the people we love cannot take care of their own families doing this work as a profession.
A recent poll shows across partisan lines support is more than 70% for some sort of public investment.
Timestamp at 44:38 minutes. Incredible how far we've come on an issue that everyone thought was a personal responsibility. Think about the shifts that have been transformational. In the last 2 years alone as part of the Biden administration. Care rose from what was maybe seen at best as kind of a women's issue, family issue, women's pregnancy to the centre of the Biden economic agenda, and then it emerged in a holistic way. It wasn't just childcare, it wasn't just paid leave, it wasn't just ageing and disability care it was all of it. The Biden administration said actually there is an agenda that has to be holistic about what intergenerational families in the US need, and then the 3rd part of it building a strong care workforce infrastructure.
Timestamp at 46:42 minutes. Affordable Care Act: (Barack Obama)
'We Won the policy but spent the next decade fighting for the narrative about healthcare. And I feel that what we've done here is that we've made huge amounts of progress on the narrative, and we came literally within spitting distance of winning the policy...like a generational breakthrough in economic policy and we are still rising every day our coalition grows I feel we didn't lose in the Inflation Reduction Act I feel we're on our way to winning.' Ai-jen Poo
Our opposition is kind of everywhere and nowhere. It’s these deeply held cultural norms and beliefs, and then there is this whole ideology around what role the government can and should play.
Timestamp at 48:48 minutes. The work of the next couple of years: There is not a kitchen table in this country where people are not talking about caring for their loved ones in one form or another. And the work is helping everyday families, and voters connect the dots between those pain points and struggles that they are feeling every day, with policy and with voting.
Reference:
Take Action with Caring Across Generations
Taken from the website:
Ai-jen Poo is a next-generation labor leader, award-winning organizer, author, and a leading voice in the women’s movement. She is the President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Director of Caring Across Generations, Co-Founder of SuperMajority and Trustee of the Ford Foundation. Ai-jen is a nationally recognized expert on elder and family care, the future of work, gender equality, immigration, narrative change, and grassroots organizing. She is the author of the celebrated book, The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America. Together with Alicia Garza, Ai-jen co-hosts the podcast, Sunstorm.
Connecting and sharing Caregiver Experiences:
As I said to
who writes, ‘‘Living in 3D: Divorce, Dementia and Destiny’’‘To quote Dr. Brené Brown, 'Vulnerability is our greatest measure of courage.' Sharing our vulnerabilities as Carers - all the "uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure." we face, and will face in the future, will hopefully not only prime others to the challenges but also CONNECT us all in this time when we most need it!’
I hope you read Amy’s beautifully resilient, continuing journey, of ‘assisted loving’.‘
Amy offers actionable insights into how to navigate emotionally charged decisions and how to engage support beyond your family, in the US. These three quotes grabbed by heart.
‘Once I found the courage to talk to my siblings, and had their complete support, I was finally able to take the practical steps to choose a nearby facility.’
‘The biggest tip I have if you are evaluating a memory care facility for a loved one with dementia is this: You don’t have to do it alone. Seek support. It is available.’
‘I now see that a whole team of people are performing the tasks that I once did all on my own—that in fact, it always was too much for just one caregiver.’
This echoes the words of Ai-jen Poo. Caring today cannot be done by one person, or even two. It takes a team, a Care team, a Care ‘squad’. I believe that it’s MORE than ‘just’ family. Adding a whole generation into the community means that for the first time in history, there are five generations in the workplace, and significantly more ‘dependents’ relying upon the working population to support their needs.
Amy had a Q&A discussion with Ai-jen Poo, herself. Here’s the article:
Each one of us can carry some of these facts forward. Whilst the numbers are different in the UK, the trends are the same.
A couple of parting thoughts for consideration.
Who will be showering and toileting you when you are older?
Short-term focused thinking won’t help todays children when we are all older.
Care, be Aware, Prepare and Engage. (CAPE). Let’s start changing the narrative. Spread the word.
Today’s caregivers are not superhuman, the ‘Hidden Crisis of caregiving is already here’ (See Emily Kenway’s book).
It will take more than, ‘relying’ on the next generation to take care of us. Today’s children - tomorrow’s working population, need our long term thinking, and immediate action, to ensure you, me and anyone in need of support, will have the care they need.
Let’s start the difficult conversations, bravely with curiosity, grace and EMPATHY!
What a fabulous essay combining your thought-provoking and action-oriented questions on caregiving, your summary of Ai-jen Poo's interview and Amy's insights in her heartfelt newsletter about memory care for her mother with dementia! Every caregiver as well as middle-aged people who will need care in the not-so-far future should give this a read.
@Victoria thank you SO MUCH for all that you do to bring important and critical information to carers and to everyone (because we will all either be carers or need care or most likely both, in our lives). I appreciate the time you took to transcribe the key points of this important interview with Ai-jen Poo. Thank you for sharing some of my own writing on this topic from my Substack, Living in 3D: Divorce, Dementia and Destiny. Like you, I am committed to shining a light on the personal struggle of caregiving and sounding the community call to action. Together, we can make a difference. I especially appreciate your recommendation of this CNBC podcast with Ai-jen Poo, one of the most passionate advocates on the need for a care economy. In my own conversation with her, she radiated intelligence, passion and deep empathy, for everyone involved: family caregivers, those in need of care, and care workers who are largely underpaid and undervalued.