Anyone who’s counted on a child-care provider in order to keep their own job knows just how essential — how fundamental — that labor is to a functioning, equitable society. Yet somehow, there’s still debate over whether child care is infrastructure.
“When we invoke the term infrastructure, what we’re really saying is, these are the things that literally hold together our civilization and our society,” says Sarah Jimenez, a senior researcher with the Boston-based coalition Community Labor United, which helped launch the pilot program Care That Works to help match parents in the trades with licensed family child-care providers. “Human communities are built on people taking care of each other,” she adds, not just on people constructing buildings and bridges.
Read the full op-ed at The Boston Globe.
